Note: It’s unclear what the source of this data is. It may be Oricon, but that’s not confirmed. I haven’t been able to find out from googling around a bit. If it is Oricon, then keep in mind that you should use these numbers for their relative values, not as an absolute number.
https://tieba.baidu.com/p/5714029788
https://rio2016.5ch.net/test/read.cgi/anime4vip/1524994809/535
I’d seen a smaller version of this post on 5ch a while back, but Ultimatemegax pointed out a more complete version of the rankings today. It covers the top 20 disc publishers by revenue in 2017, for all discs and for animation specifically.
2017 Video Disc Revenue by Publisher, All
| Rank | Revenue | Company |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | ¥20,818,200,000 | Sony Music Entertainment |
| 2 | ¥19,385,900,000 | Avex Group |
| 3 | ¥12,287,700,000 | NBC Universal Entertainment Japan |
| 4 | ¥11,237,100,000 | Touhou |
| 5 | ¥9,941,100,000 | Warner Brothers Home Entertainment |
| 6 | ¥9,900,400,000 | Walt Disney Japan |
| 7 | ¥9,647,300,000 | J Storm |
| 8 | ¥8,557,000,000 | Bandai Visual |
| 9 | ¥6,038,700,000 | Universal Music |
| 10 | ¥5,916,100,000 | Kadokawa |
| 11 | ¥5,909,700,000 | King Records |
| 12 | ¥5,573,300,000 | Pony Canyon |
| 13 | ¥5,147,700,000 | VAP |
| 14 | ¥4,872,600,000 | 20th Century Fox Entertainment |
| 15 | ¥4,430,800,000 | Victor Entertainment |
| 16 | ¥3,920,700,000 | TBS |
| 17 | ¥3,556,300,000 | Toei Video |
| 18 | ¥3,463,800,000 | Sony Pictures Entertainment |
| 19 | ¥2,855,700,000 | Johnny's Entertainment |
| 20 | ¥2,763,000,000 | NHK Enterprises |
2017 Video Disc Revenue by Publisher, Animation
| Rank | Revenue | % of total | Company |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ¥11,286,700,000 | 54.2% | Sony Music Entertainment |
| 2 | ¥7,863,300,000 | 70.0% | Touhou |
| 3 | ¥7,812,700,000 | 91.3% | Bandai Visual |
| 4 | ¥4,320,500,000 | 73.0% | Kadokawa |
| 5 | ¥4,218,300,000 | 21.8% | Avex Group |
| 6 | ¥2,965,300,000 | 50.2% | King Records |
| 7 | ¥2,116,600,000 | 38.0% | Pony Canyon |
| 8 | ¥2,073,200,000 | 20.9% | Warner Brothers Home Entertainment |
| 9 | ¥1,949,400,000 | 15.9% | NBC Universal Entertainment Japan |
| 10 | ¥1,801,900,000 | Shogakukan | |
| 11 | ¥1,277,000,000 | Kyoto Animation | |
| 12 | ¥1,036,300,000 | Marvelous | |
| 13 | ¥978,100,000 | Happinet | |
| 14 | ¥972,400,000 | 9.8% | Walt Disney Japan |
| 15 | ¥964,300,000 | Frontier Works | |
| 16 | ¥937,200,000 | 18.2% | VAP |
| 17 | ¥599,400,000 | 13.5% | Victor Entertainment |
| 18 | ¥509,400,000 | Showgate | |
| 19 | ¥476,600,000 | Shochiku Home Video | |
| 20 | ¥308,900,000 | Overlap |
Some notes:
(If there’s no percentage in the second chart, that’s just because the publisher isn’t in the top 20 overall, only for animation.)
The “% of total” column in the second chart records how much of that company’s total disc revenue comes from animation. You can see this vary from under 20% for NBC, VAP, and Victor Entertainment up to a massive 91% for Bandai Visual. This also shows how big Aniplex (owned by Sony) is among anime publishers – more than half of all disc revenue for Japan’s biggest disc publisher comes from animation, and thus from Aniplex and its anime releases. Their dominance of the market is wild.
Touhou’s position in second place can be summed up very simply: Kimi no Na wa. Just based on what’s been reported through Oricon, I have KnNw at well over ¥5bn alone, which is a huge chunk of Touhou’s overall animation sales and nearly half of the entire company’s revenues. As for other animation-heavy publishers, Kadokawa is unsurprisingly one of them, and King Records comes in at a hefty 50% as well.
KnNw aside, by and large the big numbers are no surprise: Sony/Aniplex, Bandai, Kadokawa, Avex. Though it’s worth noting how Avex falls from 2nd to 5th and less than 22% of its revenue comes from animation. This is because Avex is absolutely massive in sales of music DVD/BDs. That’s why J Storm is so high, they’re the label that handles all the boy band mega-groups under the Johnny’s label.
In the second chart we also see smaller players who are nonetheless heavily involved in animation. Kyoto Animation we know for sure is there for the purposes of disc sales, as they do publish their own discs (but don’t do their own music and such). About a quarter of their number is from Koe no Katachi. There’s also smaller players like Marvelous, Happinet, Frontier Works (owned by Animate), Showgate, Shochiku, and Overlap in this list. Some of them are only there for a handful of shows. For example, a significant chunk of Showgate’s number is likely to be from Re:Zero, despite most of its volumes coming out in 2016. Overlap has to be almost entirely BanG Dream, which I have at ¥257m (all volumes were released in 2017).
So the source of this is not completely clear (but likely Oricon) and there’s a lot of unknowns about how it was calculated but I thought it was interesting enough to post, just to see which publishers are really all-in on anime and which only handle anime as a smaller proportion of their total sales.
(At the first source link there’s also charts for music-related sales, if you want to peruse that.)