The physical print of the Japanese manga market was at its highest during the mid-90’s. However, the market plunged for the next 20 years for paper printed manga.

Overall, in the publishing sector, the share of manga has been around 25% for a large amount of time. However, in 2020, it has risen to nearly 40%.

The rapid sales of Shueisha and Kodansha in the previous 3 years are due to the digitizing weekly manga magazines and launching apps. 　

　

Earlier, manga apps operated at a lost for years viz. Comico & GANMA! and only after the significant increase in consumption of e-manga that these companies will create profits.

However, the e-manga sales overtook the paper market in 2019 and now has a market share of 60% to 70% in the manga market.

The electronic manga market has continued to grow since Covid19 pandemic. According to research conducted by Impress Research Institute, the Japanese domestic electronic manga sales has increased by 16.4%.

The manga sales for this FY2021 is 466 billion yen, an increase of ~66 billion yen from previous years 400.2 billion yen.

The market share of the industry has also increased to 84.6%, an increase of 1.6% from previous years 83%.

On the contrary, the advertising market for manga apps were sluggish. Despite the increase in user base, the advertising market for manga apps remained at 26 billion yen, same as previous year. Even the projection of the market is humbly 27 billion yen for next year.

This is caused due to the drop in advertising unit cost and the deterioration of advertising index. Along with this, the privacy protection rule is also hinted to be the reason as well for the loss.

In addition, the overall sales for e-books in Japan have rapidly increased during the pandemic. It has reached 551 billion yen in FY2021.

For this survey, data was taken by conducting interviews with publishers, e-book stores, distributors, content providers, internet advertising companies, e-library service providers etc. along with the questionnaires given to the users.

The e-book sales have increased by 14.3% from previous years growth of 28.6%. As per Impress Research Institute, the growth is due to the increased consumption of content thanks to the continuation of work from home and stay at home scenario.

The growth was extrapolated to be 537.8 billion yen in FY2021, however, it exceeded its mark. In the FY2026 the growth is expected to be 804.8 billion yen.

Source: PIVOT