I don't have the time to read every post in the last couple of pages but if I get the gist of it is mostly about Toriko vs BLEACH and their respective popularity at the time.
BTW I saw some people talking about Toriko's sales so here are the latest numbers
per easylove's WSJ video. (23'638,000 sold updated January 17, so a little bit after tha manga had ended iirc but it might be missing sales from its last volume).
That puts it at the half million seller club, along with other titles like Eyeshield 21, Nurarihyon, Black Cat and Shokugeki No Soma, titles that didn't get cancelled but weren't exactly up to part in sales/popularity with the biggest manga of their time.
Toriko as previously noted got the biggest push ever... Like they actually made an issue of WSJ where you could supposedly smell the pages of the Toriko chapter or something like that iirc it was chapter 2..
Toriko's 1st anime episode was a crossover with One Piece (And it had another with DB and OP too iirc).
Like I know Shimabu is friends with Oda, and Dragon Ball is a Toei property.. So for the big marketing push (And it is the biggest marketing push JUMP has ever tried, at least that I have witnessed) it was .. well not a failure but not a success either.
As for BLEACH, while BLEACH was in decline when Toriko was gaining popularity neither series had anything to do with their decline and/or popularity increase, it's not like Toriko was taking away marketing that would have benefitted BLEACH which was a "dying" series, sure it had been colossal in its halcyon days (I don't even know if I'm using this expression correctly but it's a BLEACH reference lol) but it was declining in sales by the volume.
What do you mean it's not a million seller? It's mathematically impossible for BLEACH to have achieved its sales (90M Japan) without at least one of its volumes selling one million volumes, If I were to make a guess I'd say volumes 1-48 probably sold around 1.5m and the rest a little bit less than a million.. Sure maybe not all its volumes sold a million (Though maybe they did) but it definetly is a million seller in all likeness.
Also... Saint Seiya is in another level, its manga might not have been the best seller but it's a gold mine as a franchise. It has a huge fanbase worldwide and even in Japan it still gets monthly figures, events, has a magazine for the figure line, has a mobile game, etc...
This is something I actually was thinking the other day, there are a couple of franchises whose manga sold super well like Rokudenashi BLUES, Slam Dunk, Yu Yu Hakusho but you almost never see any merchandise from them, while Saint Seiya gets tons of merchandise every month.
