Posting about some of the manga I read. I read manga in Japanese.
Something that I had believed for years without making the effort to actually look up figures for myself until now, but Weekly Shounen Jump apparently has a bigger female readership than the readership of Ciao, the biggest shoujo magazine.
And, yeah, 20.2% of 1,176,667 is over 50% higher than 143,333.
Figures from a site aimed at advertisers:
https://www.zasshi-ad.com/media/comic/boy/weeklyjump.html
https://www.zasshi-ad.com/media/comic/girl/chao.html
i belieeeeeve these are based on old numbers!
shueisha's most recent numbers i've seen put the 10-15 range at only 26% -
(https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2019-04-22/shueisha-reveals-new-circulation-numbers-demographics-for-its-manga-magazines/.145991)
but the 2009 numbers put 10-15 at 62.9% (https://www.animenewsnetwork.com/news/2009-02-23/manga-mags-demographics-circulation-numbers-posted) - so my guess is the 63% number here is pulling from the 2009 stats rather than the more recent 2019.
kids don't read jump any more! probably relatedly, circulation numbers are waaaay down, lol.
shueisha stopped publishing how many girls read weekly shounen jump ages ago as far as i can tell, even though they did it for every other magazine they publish in their 2019 numbers! the most recent thing i've seen is this bit from 2012 (https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/338044011937923072/974796275973234739/20220513_181135.jpg)
MY suspicion is they stopped publishing gender numbers because more girls read jump than they'd like - one piece has been the most popular/one of the most popular manga across the board, and this 2012 bit of stats says its readership is 51% female.
GRANTED the numbers have been changing A Lot, so this may be way off speculation-wise. buuut gintama (63.8% female), naruto (45.6%), bleach (50.7%), and one piece (51.8%) are among the top selling manga jump has ever had, so i think they could be a good indicator for the magazine overall. and if they are then the gender demo for the magazine was probably trending towards closer to 50/50 and continues to!
anyway - just something i thought was interesting, lol! sorry for infodumping. my friend who actually reads + speaks japanese looked into weekly jump demographics a little while ago because we're interested in that sort of thing and this is what we turned up.
Yeah, using the Wayback Machine it looks like the gender and age data for WSJ is just old. I guess the 2023 June date only applies to the 1,176,667 figure, which does seem to have been updated.
The main thing I was interested in was the idea that WSJ is the magazine with the biggest female readership. It seems like it's hard for not to be, and by a long way?
