I don't know about you guys, but the manga community has always felt a little underground.
The last time i checked, Naruto and Bleach were the only manga that had over 1000 in reading list.
As of today (21/12) the number is 20, with Naruto and Bleach with 2500 in reading list each.

So obviously the community (or leachers) are growing, but i was wondering how big it is...

Can anyone make a reliable estimation? Is 10000 people more or less accurate?
Or is it closer to 30000 if we look at the total view of the forum rules?

Last edited by RilleL at 5:34 am, Dec 21 2007

i think it´s even bigger. I have been checking releases everyday for most than 4 years but had been in the forum for a month, i mean for one person here who had read the rules there are surely a lot more who only check for releases and aren´t even registered in the forums.

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Yea, the thought has crossed my mind...
I thought 10000 at first because the idea of "one of every four person reads naruto" didn't seem that impossible...
But not every people that reads manga shows up in this forum... I guess that makes the community larger than i anticipated. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing...

If you count all the noobs who watch dubs on adult swim, its hella alot bigger than 10,000.

i think he's talking about manga and not anime. and there has to be a lot more than 10k since that amount is probably in japan alone.

Aye...then what about all those little girls who go to the bookstore and actually buy manga? >_<


ACTUALLY BUY IT.

lol

yah, i know and there are also hundreds of site out there where you can get/read manga.

yeh....i think 10,000 is way too low. It would be something like.....50,000 minimum, in the US alone.

Ah? Ten thousand manga readers in "Japan alone"? What are you talking about?

And to the thread opener: What do you mean with "manga community"? Are you talking about this community, the American one, or the one conformed globally? Because your responses are very ambiguous, like:

so I don't what you're referring to. But since you're saying "every people who reads manga" I suppose that you want to know how many people in the world conforms the "manga community", (as you call it) so I'm going to answer as if you were referring to that sentence literally.

In the United States of America, manga is a very small subculture. In fact, "comics" in general are a subculture in the USA. Scott Mccloud listed the current active comics-readership in America at somewhere under 500,000 people. And those estimates are taking in account every type of comic being sold, and since manga is considered a "sub-genre" of comics in general, you can imagine how few core American manga fans are out there.


As stated before, we are not talking about anime here, but I think that part of this sentence is worth paying attention. Just because some series have reached popularity within the masses that doesn't mean that manga in general is popular. For example, according to an article published in du9- L'autre bande dessinée (more specifically, in the Dossier: Numérologie, cru 2006 number) in France manga takes up to 36.3% of the total volume sales. But...Naruto alone represents about 10% of the manga market in France -which suggests a population of 110,000 Naruto fans- and what is worse: the five top-selling manga series (Naruto, Dragon Ball, One Piece, FullMetal Alchemist and Samurai Deeper Kyo) control a third of the total manga sales.
As we see here, our first impression about the manga industry in France (the second country, after Japan, in reading manga worldwide (Lalinde :1 )) can be kind of deceiving when we first see the statistics, but when we closely examine the data we can appreciate that the manga industry is not as big as we first thought. In this case in particular, we can say that Naruto is very popular in France, but we cannot say that manga is as mainstream as Naruto in the aforementioned country (even though very popular, compared with other first-world Western nations).
What I'm trying to say here is that just because a title (or title(s), whatever the case may be) is extremely popular that doesn't mean that manga in general is becoming popular.

In the case of Japan, well, first of all, like Jeff Yang affirms in his article in SF Gate: "Indeed, it's fair to say there's no such thing as a manga "fan" in Japan, any more than there are television "fans" in the United States; manga is a mass medium that encompasses a multitude of categories, genres and subgenres, each of which has a discrete target audience and a devoted following".
According to Dai Nippon Printing International Tchiei's article, the total sales of published material in Japan (including magazines and books but excluding newspapers) is two trillion five-hundred billion yen, of which manga sales account for nearly one quarter. Given a total Japanese population of 120 million, DNP calculated that the average Japanese spends approximately 2,000 yen per year on manga in one form or another. (You can imagine how extremely big the manga market is in Japan).

While I think that it is almost impossible to have an accurate view of the state of the manga "community" in the entire world, we could say that excepting a couple of countries, manga is a very small subculture in the Western civilization. (But while I don't have enough data to support this, I'm pretty sure that the opposite is applicable to most "far east-countries": while manga remains as a small cultural art form in the Occident, is pretty popular in the Sinosphere.)

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Anyway, i was referring to this "scanlation" community, not the world wide. That's why i mentioned the "underground" part in my first post, but i guess i wasn't really clear on that.
And to be absolutely clear, with the scanlation community i mean everyone that reads their work too.

It's like this Big.

(Hand)[----------------------------------------------------------------------------](Hand)

You mean the ones that download scans and scanlations online regularly?

Over a million easily, however the actual number can not be in any way determined or calculated therefore this question is nil.

Then there are the Chinese scanlations... there's tons of chinese online manga viewers (Japanese to Chinese).

I can tell you one thing, it's less mainstream than anime in the west (opposite in Japan though I believe) except for the top 5 - 10 shounen series in Shounen Jump (though those are the "mainstream" animes as well).

I Find this topic interesting because i'm brazilian and theres a big fansub community( no as English communitys) translating the animes from japanese to portuguese

But the brazilian manga community is Small because the most of the scanlations tranlates from english

and because of that i download english scanlation mangas

But u must thinking why brazil have at least a big Anime/Manga Community

it is because whe don't have much anime/manga on Market but it's getting bigger

whe have some manga and some times they cut the volume in half ¬¬ to sell slow

but twe don't have that much anime and that is wath makes our fansubs commuty that big

I was thinking that i never see a Europe Portuguese Fansub or Scanlation thats Strange

There French Scanlations but they don't are that many because they have market

But All the scanlations can't keep up with the japanese realeses the japanese market realeses Thousand our Hundred Thousands or even million titles by year

if u really wants to read manga u need to Know Japenese and Live in Japan or be rich to Import because Even the raws can't keep up

It's because of that that i think that u can have a real manga community on Japan
and BEcause of that The Manga community over the World don't grow faster