An analysis for that ToC video and something I noticed about Kimetsu No Yaiba's underperformance pre-anime:
Fuma no Kojiro, Tenchi wo Kurau, Bobobo, Eyeshield 21, are all series that got to rank in the top 5 places of Jump for periods of time and all were short-ish series (well except Eyeshield 21) but I'm trying to make a comparison with Kimetsu No Yaiba.
This is because (and this surprises me, since I probably never paid close attention to it)Kimetsu No Yaiba constantly ranked in top 5 ever since its 2nd year! (From September 2017, which is more accurately when Kimetsu was 1 year and a half: 19 months).
In fact it never got lower than 6th place after it's 1st and half year (A feat that no other manga besides One Piece achieved, Dr. Stone and The Promised Neverland fell to 6th place or lower a couple of weeks from a quick glance in the video), constantly ranking 4th or better!
Now I'm gonna compare it to the previous manga I mentioned, which are also manga that ranked 5th place or better for some time but weren't super-duper sellers (Like Idk Shaman King, Naruto, Prince of Tennis which were Million Sellers).
Fuma no Kojiro: sold 4.5 million with 10 volumes. Average of 450,000 copies per volume
Tenchi wo Kurau: sadly I don't have sales data*
Bobobo: sold 7'000,000 with 21 volumes. Average of 333,333 copies per volume
Eyeshield 21: sold 20'000,000 with 37 volumes. Average of 540,000 copies per volume
As I said these are some of the "lower selling" manga that ranked well in the TOC. What I'm trying to get to is that Kimetsu No Yaiba sold around 120k pre-anime, which for a manga that ranked so well in the TOC is very, very, very low! As you can see these manga which were good rankers and are the "lowest sellers that achieved great ToC rankings" sold around half a million per volume.
So basically Kimetsu No Yaiba was underperforming in sales BY A LOT, for comparison other manga that had ranked very well in the TOC were Rurouni Kenshin, Yu Yu Hakusho, Takeshi, Prince of Tennis, of course, if the title was long like Prince of tennis a decline in TOC ranking was usually the case.
But all those titles were million sellers.. So, and this is just my theory.. Maybe something prevented Kimetsu No Yaiba from selling like hotcakes, my guess is that it was probably the art, it looks kinda old, but once the anime adaptation started and got people hooked it sold like it should have (In fact it being undersold probably helped it in the long run since sooooooooooo many people that hadn't bought it started buying it on mass).
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
*BTW Tenchi wo kurau is an interesting case, because I couldn't find sales date about it.. Apparently it was super popular since its very beginning (Check the video it ran from 1983-1984 and at its start had 1-2 ranks then slightly dropped to 3-4ish ranks) but the author decided to end it on volume 7
Here's the wikipedia entry for the series, I used google translate and that's what I got from it, but if someone knows Japanese it would be cool if they could translate
ja.wikipedia.org
@Mankichi Togawa:
Ey, it's funny I hadn't seen your post and you mentioned Hiroshi Motomiya manga and I was interested on finding more about Tenchi Wo Kurau.. Do you happen to know anything about it?? It ranked well in the TOCs, but from what I could understand in the wiki article it was apparently cancelled by Jump due to the TOC results... But then it was revealed by Motomiya that it was actually his decision to end it??
