Re: Weekly Shounen Jump [2009] - Discussion & TOC Talk v.3
Reborn, D.Gray and Gintama are all succesful in their own right. Eyeshield 21 anime, despite sucking so much is also successful.Slice of life series are actually not that successful in term of rating compare to battle mangas. Slice of life unless it's a long runner like Doraemon, Sazae-san, Chibi Maruko, are hardly that successful. Anime profits from rating and merchandise, from what i see from rating result and DVD sales, it's actually quite constant. If Mago is to be animated in 2011, it means at that time it will passed 150 chapters, which is very unlikely. Successful battle manga in Jump are usually animated before they reached 100 or reached around 101+, but never that long.
Anime don't profit from ratings at all. Unlike many other countries, in Japan the studios actually pay the networks to air the shows. Ratings don't affect the actual profit in any way. They tend to result in larger exposure, which correlates with better DVD sales and merchandise sales, but ratings themselves don't result in profit.
Anime studios make the biggest portion of their money from DVD sales (why do you think anime DVDs are so ridiculously overpriced). Merchandise is also a big profit maker, but in the case of a show adapted from a manga, I would guess that the original license holder (in Jump's case, Shueisa) would get the majority of the profit.
Battle manga tend to be very popular and result in lots of toys and video games and the like. While slice of life series aren't as popular with kids, they pander to more of an otaku audience, and generally get better DVD sales. They also sell more in the way of otaku type merchandise (PVC figures and things like that).
As far as your latter point, Naruto took three years to get animated. Would you consider that a 'successful battle manga'? It was closing on 150 chapters when the anime started. Bleach actually took over 3 years (manga started in August of 2001, Anime started in October of 2004).