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[Twinwolf]

If you want something cute and cheerful you could consider Yuuki Yuuna wa Yuusha, a slice of life about the Hero Club finding homes for kittens and helping people in general.

If you're going to watch that, then you should also watch Puella Magi Madoka Magica and Angel Beats! 

[JoshuaFH]

And don't forget Anohana, the jolly rollicking good laughs never stop there.

[Culise]

I've always favored Narutaru, the heartwarming tale of a girl and her starfish, and Bokurano, a hot-blooded story about a giant mecha and the kid heroes who pilot it to save the world, personally. 

Spoiler: Narutaru (click to show/hide)

Spoiler: Bokurano (click to show/hide)

[Reelya]

I'd argue that this is a case where sales and overall popularity don't align, actually. Rakugo is more or less exclusive to people who are interested in a certain thing, and those people are also generally people of a certain age (and thus income) and who are more ready and able to buy what they want; a shounen title is more targets a much younger demographic, and one less able to go spending money on (fairly expensive) BDs. That said, it's true that we rarely get josei anime in the first place; that definitely contributes to it. But I don't think that we would see this many sales if it wasn't also a high quality product for the niche

I don't think the show is more or less exclusive to people with a pre-existing interest in rakugo, I'd say it's more of general interest to people with an interest in drama anime at all. Someone who likes Mushishi would probably like Rakugo, and there are a LOT of Mushishi fans out there.

We have another metric we can compare for general popularity, and that is the number of myanimelist (or similar) users who have listed the show on their list. It's in the bottom-right of each anime block here:

http://myanimelist.net/anime/season/2016/winter

That's a pretty good barometer of general popularity of a series outside Japan (i.e. how many people are interested in watching each show). The top 5 are:

Erased, 162,214
Grimgar, 101,120
Musaigen no Phantom World, 94,189
Dagashi Kashi, 90,757
Konosuba,  77,721

Apparently a larger number of people think Musaigen and Dagashi Kashi are worth spending time on, regardless of what the BD preorder sales say.

Rakugo is in the middle of the pack @ 31000 viewers, which is clearly lower than the most popular series, but there are plenty of clearly "mainstream anime" things with a lot less viewers than that, e.g. PSO2 and Koukaku no Pandora both clock under 20,000 viewers.

[Cruxador]

I don't think the show is more or less exclusive to people with a pre-existing interest in rakugo, I'd say it's more of general interest to people with an interest in drama anime at all.

Yeah, I didn't mean that it was necessarily a pre-existing interest in the specific subject either.

probably the usual people who would buy josei anime

I'm not sure that's a huge demographic.

myanimelist users tend to be western and younger.

And not likely to buy anything, so what do they matter? They're essentially a null-value as far as the market is concerned.

[Reelya]

And not likely to buy anything, so what do they matter? They're essentially a null-value as far as the market is concerned.

But doesn't this just nullify your previous argument that Rakugo's strong sales figures meant nothing? A moment ago you were arguing that strong sales figures were misleading because the show wasn't actually watched by that many people.

Quite a few people are watching Rakugo, and quite a few people are buying Rakugo. That speaks for itself, it has much more of a broad appeal than you were saying. Meanwhile that Pandora one is losing in both sales and viewers.

[Orange Wizard]

And not likely to buy anything, so what do they matter? They're essentially a null-value as far as the market is concerned.

That doesn't sound right. Are the any statistics floating around?

[Cruxador]

And not likely to buy anything, so what do they matter? They're essentially a null-value as far as the market is concerned.

But doesn't this just nullify your previous argument that Rakugo's strong sales figures meant nothing?

I may have lost track of what I was talking about.

And not likely to buy anything, so what do they matter? They're essentially a null-value as far as the market is concerned.

That doesn't sound right. Are the any statistics floating around?

Well, I don't have any. But I'm curious under what logic it sounds odd to you? In my experience it's pretty rare for westerners to buy Japanese products even if they're reasonably wealthy and invested in it, in large part due to the inconvenience of importing. Places like MAL mostly have just kids, who are unlikely to have the funding to spare, or the practical logistical skills necessary to go about it. If nothing else, I would imagine a lot more products would be available without importing if there was any appreciable western market, and if a demographic is insignificant, then a subset of it must also be.

[Orange Wizard]

I dunno, it just strikes me as odd that the millions of anime fans outside of Japan would have a negligible impact on sales. They'd be less likely to buy things than fans in Japan proper, but to the point where those numbers can be ignored? That would be very strange.

[Sirus]

Incredibly strange, considering that many large bookstores in the United States sell manga (and less commonly other anime merchandise), not to mention hobby and specialty stores.

And of course we all have access to the world's greatest bazaar, the Internet.

[Reelya]

If you look at anime DVD sales for the West it's almost all for older series. New shows don't blip very high, unlike Japan.

Where the anime studios would be making the bulk of the western money is through Crunchyroll and other licensees. Crunchyroll is estimated to have 750,000 users as of Dec 2015. Putting that together with other data, Crunchyroll's total user base has been estimated:

Nov 2011: 70,000 subscribers
Sept 2012: 110,000 subscribers (+4000 / month)
March 2013: 200,000 subscribers (+15000 / month)
Nov 2014: 400,000 subscribers (+10000 / month)
Dec 2015: 750,000 subscribers (+25000 / month)

When Crunchyroll had 400,000 subscribers the revenue was estimated at 300 million yen per month. That's almost doubled since Nov 2014. So we're looking at CR having a yearly turnover of around $US 72 million. They'll probably crack $100 million in annual turnover within a year at the current rate of growth. That's no small potatoes. CR is a mainstream media player now. And a bigger user base only means better things: it reduces their per-customer cost so they can keep subscriptions reasonable, while allowing them to get a wider variety of content and host better servers. Part of the rise is probably due to people getting better connections as time goes on and streaming becoming more viable, plus the rising age and income of the typical western anime viewer (anime viewers age, just like video game players do), meaning more people prefer to pay rather than pirate.

Meanwhile I found an interesting tidbit. The Love Live School Idol phone game has 14 million registered users in Japan. That's over 10% of the entire nation of Japan, and represents almost 1/3 of the 50 million smartphone users in the country. Those are some pretty huge market numbers.

[penguinofhonor]

Why do people care so much about the highest charting animes? Do you check up on the top 40 to make sure you're listening to the most popular music too?

Not that I'm judging anyone, but I usually expect a "popularity isn't important" response from the Dwarf Fortress forums. It puzzles me that animes aren't approached the same way.

[Reelya]

Why does person care about that. The main discussion was actually about how people are bringing up data like pre-order sales, but then cherry-picking - high pre-order sales for shows they like are proof that it's a good/popular show, but high pre-order sales for shows they don't like are suddenly "misleading data". Very convenient that. Obviously that has nothing to do with the actual pre-order sales and everything to do with touting a show someone likes: it's expressing a personal opinion about which is the best show, and trying to use an external source to claim it's "objectively" the best show (it's an appeal to authority).

I don't care about the pre-order sales at all, but I do get annoyed when people cite sources in a misleading way or cherry-pick their sources.

[penguinofhonor]

I've seen similar topics pop up here a few times, but I guess it does make sense that highest popularity would be tangentially relevant to a lot of things.

[Uzu Bash]

You can't have epeen without big numbers. Expressing subjective enjoyment in a show and supporting it with nothing but persuasion doesn't leave you anything to waggle at anyone.