How Popular was Re:Creators in Japan?

Re:Creators was easily my favorite anime of last year. But how popular was it in Japan? Let’s look at the numbers to find out.

“Popularity” is difficult to quantify–especially when it comes to something like anime. However, each season, a group of professional researchers come together as part of the “Anime Shicho Logu Bunseki Girudo” (lit. “The Anime Viewing Log Analysis Guild”) and they publish a book of concrete data and in-depth analysis under the title Anime no Mirarekata (lit. The Way Anime Was Watched). They then sell the book at the Comiket doujinshi convention.  

The data they gather (and then expertly interpret) comes largely from TV manufacturers themselves. Of course, this means there is a big hole in the data when it comes to the lack of streaming information. However, streaming is far less ubiquitous in Japan than it is in the US (though this is changing). And when anime are released on streaming services in Japan, episodes tend to appear a day or two late at minimum. Because of this, those who are diehard fans (or at least those who don’t want to spend money on a streaming subscription) tend to still watch anime on TV.

It’s also important to note that the data collected only includes 30-minute long, limited-run anime. This means no short-form anime are included and neither are indefinitely-running anime like Boruto or Detective Conan.

So using both Anime no Mirarekata: 2017 Spring and Anime no Mirarekata: 2017 Summer’s statistics, let’s see just how popular Re:Creators was when it was on the air.

Side Note: Ratings in Japan. Ratings are presented as a percentage. It is calculated by taking the estimated amount of actual viewers for a show and dividing that by the estimated amount of potential viewers. Thus a 1% rating means that, of all the people that could potentially be watching a show when it airs, 1% of them actually watched it.

Overall, Re:Creators was the 15th most watched anime on TV in the spring (out of 38) and the 13th most watched anime on TV in the summer (out of 42) with its 1.33% and 1.19% viewership ratings respectively. This puts it well above the median ratings for both seasons–meaning that it was watched more than half of the other anime on TV.

On the other hand, it was below the average rating in spring–though this is hardly surprising. The spring 2017 season had not one but two breakout hits that utterly trounced all the other airing anime–namely second seasons of My Hero Academia and Attack on Titan–which really served to skew the average. In the summer, where there was only a single breakout hit, Re:Creators sat just above the average.

Looking at the week-to-week ratings data, there are a few things of note. Re:Creators was always below the seasonal average (around 0.1% lower) when it came to how many people were watching live each week. This is potentially due to its 11:30pm timeslot. Likely for the same reason, the amount of DVR recordings was way above the seasonal average–a 0.6% difference by the end of the summer season. Likewise, the amount of people that actually watched what they recorded was above the average–though only by around 0.1%.

Image source: TVアニメ“Re:CREATORS”公式 on Twitter

The only real outlier in the data comes on episode 13. While the number of live viewers–aka., the most hardcore fans–stayed the same, the number of recordings and number of recordings watched both plummeted. Why? It’s almost certainly because episode 13 was the series’ token recap episode. And while it turned out to easily be the funniest episode of the whole series–and one of the best recap episodes ever made–it’s clear that many viewers didn’t even give it a shot.

Now to give all that information a bit more context, let’s see how Re:Creators stacked up against the best and worst of the spring and summer seasons.

The most-viewed anime of both seasons, as luck would have it, was superhero school adventure My Hero Academia. It had over three times Re:Creators viewers in the spring and over four times its viewers in the summer.

On the other end of the curve, Re:Creators had over four times the viewers of the spring’s least-watched, Twin Angel Break, and close to six times the viewers of the summer’s biggest flop, Fox Spirit Matchmaker.

Beyond than TV ratings information, there is also a bit of data in Anime no Mirarekata about how popular each series was on Twitter (gathered by tracking how often each series’ hashtags were used). During the spring season, Re:Creators was the third most talked-about anime–even beating out My Hero Academia. In the summer, it fell to seventh, slipping to two slots below My Hero Academia.

Image source: TVアニメ“Re:CREATORS”公式 on Twitter

So in the end, thanks to Anime no Mirarekata: 2017 Spring and Summer, we have a pretty clear idea of just how popular Re:Creators was during its run in Japan. Far from being a breakout hit, it was still more watched than the majority of other anime throughout both seasons. But while the amount of viewers was nothing groundbreaking, their engagement was surprisingly high. They went to Twitter in droves to talk about it, their conversations eclipsing those of many anime with far more weekly viewers.

Not bad for an original anime with no published source material, made by a fledgling studio.  

For those of you who speak Japanese and are interested in a much more detailed analysis, check out the full reports in Anime no Mirarekata: 2017 Spring and Anime no Mirarekata: 2017 Summer. (While each volume was originally released at Comiket, second hand copies can be purchased at various doujin resellers in Japan. I got my copies through Comic Zin.)

[Author’s Note: If you found this article interesting and would like a similar analysis of any other 2016-2017 anime, just say the word.]

Top Image Source: TVアニメ“Re:CREATORS”公式‏