10 Year New Comics Sales Trendline

[Zonker]

CBG has come out with their year-end estimates of sales volumes. In summary 2006 was the best year since 1998 for number of copies sold. I'm focusing on volumes, not dollars, since we've beaten the cover price horse to death in previous threads. For my own amusement, I graphed the numbers CBG reports for the number of copies of the Top 300 titles shipped each year. Here you go...

 

 

Y axis is in Millions of copies of the monthly Top 300 titles shipped over the course of the year.

 

If we assume each of the Top 300 titles was a monthly, then we get a rough average per-issue sales of 34,700 in 1996, and 22,800 in 2006. (With the low point being an anemic 18,600 in 2001. )

 

And here's the link to the Newsarama coverage. From here you can click through to the CBG source data if you wish.

 

web page

 

Some perhaps-relevant dates with respect to the above timeline...

 

1996 Heroes World shuts down; Marvel bankrupt (through mid-1998)

2000 Joe Quesada becomes Marvel EIC, first X-Men movie

2002 First Spider-Man movie, unit sales of monthly comics ends yearly decline

[the blob]

Someone here might point out that volume might get bumped up a bit by the 10 cent, 12 cent, 25 cent etc. cover price issues that come out, though there has been less of that in the past year.

[rob_allan]

Just out of curiosity, does this include FCBD offerings? I'm only asking because I don't think there was a FCBD in 98 was there?

[Zonker]

I don't know if FCBD is included or not. FCBD did start in 2002, so...

 

I doubt the cheapie promotions are a significant factor in 2006's numbers. Most of the promotions I'm aware of (Batman 10 cent, Superman 10 cent, Batman 12 cent, FF 9 cent, Conan #0) were several years ago.

[mattbird_home]

How large do people believe the bump caused by variant covers has been? I wonder if that sales tactic is masking an overall decline in actual readership..

[brasseye]

How large do people believe the bump caused by variant covers has been? I wonder if that sales tactic is masking an overall decline in actual readership..

 

You'd think if people are buying less regular copies, variant cover's go along with the general trend as well. So the impact of them would be negligable, as the frequency, and no of titles is often small.

Plus overall they DO represent comic book consumption so singleing them out doesn't make too much sense. They are not a different animal.

[SuperBird]

no no- that's not what I meant. I mean, are stores ordering more books to get the ratio variants?

[Ivanko]

IMO yes.

[MichiganFlynn]

I would think so as well. I find alot of my LCS order more copies to get 2-3 variant, jack them up and make up the difference on the copies that don't sell.

 

On the other hand if those copies do sell for cover price, they make twice the profit. It's a gamble for sure but always assume if a popular title comes out with a 1:20 or 1:50 or god help us another 1:100 cover, there's always going to be people ordering more copies. However to some peoples credit, I seldom see a 1:50 or 1:100 unless it's a hot book (No origins #10 bleh!).

[awe4one]

How large do people believe the bump caused by variant covers has been? I wonder if that sales tactic is masking an overall decline in actual readership..

 

Variant covers have undoubtably boosted these numbers. Also, the Ultimate Universe titles started heating up and expanding towards the end of 2001/2002 which helped Marvel tremendously...

 

Jim

[the blob]

if it is still profitable for shops to order 100 copies of a book that will only sell 75 copies in order to get the variant, i don't think it should matter in the analysis if those extra 25 copies wind up getting sold through the half price or dollar box. some "reader" is getting them, or at least a potential reader, it's not like 1992/1993 where stores wound up getting stuck with an extra 1500 copies of Turok 1 that they're still trying to sell in the quarter box.

[SuperBird]

how is it any different? a discount box is a discount box...