"The hope is that the remaining 30% that will never make back their budgets will get paid for by the successes. This is a gamble, but it's the most essential one of every entertainment industry: a few huge hits that subsidize tons of losers."
If this figure is accurate, then it represents a far better hit rate than what the US movie and TV industries usually achieve. (The rule of thumb in the US entertainment industry is that less than 25% of TV pilots makes it to the airwaves, and of those, a very small percentage last a full season; an even smaller percentage of those last more than a full season; a fraction of those, still, last enough seasons to become financially successful. I can't recall the film industry hit rate off the top of my head, but I believe the going theory is that 4 in 5 films will fail, and the remaining 1 must subsidize those failures).
In fact, I think the US entertainment businesses will need to learn a lot from the anime business. As distribution techology becomes more sophisticated, we're going to enter a world where two things happen: 1) opinion leaders within a certain genre (superfans, otaku, loyalists, diehards...whatever we want to call them) will discover new content via collaborative filtering as seen on Netflix, iTunes via the Genius algo, etc.; and 2) those folks will, in turn, share their discoveries with linkminded friends via social networks. These distribution patterns will be less than kind to the mass-market, "shotgun" approach as it's been practiced by Hollywood firms for nearly a century. Conversely, they'll be much kinder to niche-portfolio production and marketing. To patio11's point, this will mean resources being devoted to product differentiation: basic stuff for the casual fans, and more limited-edition, souped-up stuff for the otaku (where the real money gets made). It'll also mean that entertainment firms will need to get very serious about high-involvement CRM with their otaku bases, as video game companies currently do. (To some extent, this has already been happening in recent years, i.e., with everyone in Hollywood's annually bending knee to the kingmakers at ComicCon).
If this figure is accurate, then it represents a far better hit rate than what the US movie and TV industries usually achieve. (The rule of thumb in the US entertainment industry is that less than 25% of TV pilots makes it to the airwaves, and of those, a very small percentage last a full season; an even smaller percentage of those last more than a full season; a fraction of those, still, last enough seasons to become financially successful. I can't recall the film industry hit rate off the top of my head, but I believe the going theory is that 4 in 5 films will fail, and the remaining 1 must subsidize those failures).
In fact, I think the US entertainment businesses will need to learn a lot from the anime business. As distribution techology becomes more sophisticated, we're going to enter a world where two things happen: 1) opinion leaders within a certain genre (superfans, otaku, loyalists, diehards...whatever we want to call them) will discover new content via collaborative filtering as seen on Netflix, iTunes via the Genius algo, etc.; and 2) those folks will, in turn, share their discoveries with linkminded friends via social networks. These distribution patterns will be less than kind to the mass-market, "shotgun" approach as it's been practiced by Hollywood firms for nearly a century. Conversely, they'll be much kinder to niche-portfolio production and marketing. To patio11's point, this will mean resources being devoted to product differentiation: basic stuff for the casual fans, and more limited-edition, souped-up stuff for the otaku (where the real money gets made). It'll also mean that entertainment firms will need to get very serious about high-involvement CRM with their otaku bases, as video game companies currently do. (To some extent, this has already been happening in recent years, i.e., with everyone in Hollywood's annually bending knee to the kingmakers at ComicCon).