The Anime Business Impact Index: Proposing a Measure to Assess Trends in the Japanese Anime Industry Using Social Network Analysis

Abstract

This study proposes a method for understanding the activity of players in the Japanese anime industry using social network analysis. The author first identifies members of production committees for anime programs that aired between the summer of 2020 and the spring of 2022. Then, the author analyzes production committee members by computing the degree centrality, closeness centrality, and betweenness centrality of each company by season. Using this enables us to track the chronological trends of each specific company. The author also creates a new metric, the Anime Business Impact Index, to compensate for the limitations of the centrality measures. This metric can be used to effectively examine trends concerning players in Japan’s anime industry.