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Hiroki not Takuya
Joined: 17 Apr 2012
Posts: 2515
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 Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 10:19 am
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Not sure if the attendance is up/down or how it compares with an average, so maybe next time that could be included in the reporting. By my estimation based on Animecons.com it seems larger than average but small compared to AX that I attend. Apparently CRX had 45k turnstile attendance this year up ~50% from last year.
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Ashley Hakker
Joined: 31 Aug 2016
Posts: 115
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Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 11:52 am
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| Hiroki not Takuya wrote: | | Not sure if the attendance is up/down or how it compares with an average, so maybe next time that could be included in the reporting. By my estimation based on Animecons.com it seems larger than average but small compared to AX that I attend. Apparently CRX had 45k turnstile attendance this year up ~50% from last year. |
A better metric would likely be 'It is the second largest Anime Convention in Canada by a wide margin'. As well as 'Despite being 10 years younger than Anime North, Otakuthon is rapidly catching up on AN year over year.'
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Primus
Joined: 01 Mar 2006
Posts: 2762
Location: Toronto
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Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 12:09 pm
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| Ashley Hakker wrote: |
| Hiroki not Takuya wrote: | | Not sure if the attendance is up/down or how it compares with an average, so maybe next time that could be included in the reporting. By my estimation based on Animecons.com it seems larger than average but small compared to AX that I attend. Apparently CRX had 45k turnstile attendance this year up ~50% from last year. |
A better metric would likely be 'It is the second largest Anime Convention in Canada by a wide margin'. As well as 'Despite being 10 years younger than Anime North, Otakuthon is rapidly catching up on AN year over year.' |
How big is the convention centre Otakuthon uses? Anime North's stagnancy comes from them capping attendance for the last 6 years straight.
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KabaKabaFruit
Joined: 20 Sep 2007
Posts: 1871
Location: Winnipeg, Manitoba
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Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 12:15 pm
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| Ashley Hakker wrote: | | A better metric would likely be 'It is the second largest Anime Convention in Canada by a wide margin'. As well as 'Despite being 10 years younger than Anime North, Otakuthon is rapidly catching up on AN year over year.' |
That's not metric, that's spin doctoring.
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Zin5ki
Joined: 06 Jan 2008
Posts: 6680
Location: London, UK
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Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 3:56 pm
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I presume that for commercial purposes, turnstile attendance remains the definitive metric of a convention's popularity. My own preference would be for a sum of the deduplicated counts of unique attendees per day, given that the absence of weekend visitors who don't attend all days should be considered. Perhaps we'll start to see such statistics being circulated once RFID badges spread beyond AX.
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Ashley Hakker
Joined: 31 Aug 2016
Posts: 115
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Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 4:17 pm
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| Primus wrote: | | How big is the convention centre Otakuthon uses? Anime North's stagnancy comes from them capping attendance for the last 6 years straight. |
This isn't that accurate. While AN's attendance has only inched up for about the last few years ago, actual pressures from attendance has fallen. AN has managed to increase their cap somewhat, this year and last year they still had weekend passes on sale AT the con. In years before they were sold out a couple of MONTHS before the con. 2014 or 2015 was probably peak demand, where you had to pre-reg or you'd only maybe get in for Friday or Sunday only at the door. So the 'pressure' on attendance has dropped in the last few years. Def AN was HITTING it's cap and HARD a few years ago, they've stopped doing that despite only modest increases in their cap. Meanwhile Otakuthon continues to catch ground every year.
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Hiroki not Takuya
Joined: 17 Apr 2012
Posts: 2515
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Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 5:47 pm
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| Zin5ki wrote: | | I presume that for commercial purposes, turnstile attendance remains the definitive metric of a convention's popularity. My own preference would be for a sum of the deduplicated counts of unique attendees per day, given that the absence of weekend visitors who don't attend all days should be considered. Perhaps we'll start to see such statistics being circulated once RFID badges spread beyond AX. |
It will be interesting indeed since RFID seems to have eliminated the at-con registration and "no-shows" that tended to skew the numbers based on pre-registered attendees that turnstile attendance numbers try to capture. Thanks Ashley Hakker for filling me in, now why couldn't the reporter or an ANN staffer do that? Not to be too critical, but the CEO and the company are Canadian after all and I'd think they'd want to be accurate about that sort of thing...
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Ashley Hakker
Joined: 31 Aug 2016
Posts: 115
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Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 6:05 pm
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| Hiroki not Takuya wrote: | | Thanks Ashley Hakker for filling me in, now why couldn't the reporter or an ANN staffer do that? Not to be too critical, but the CEO and the company are Canadian after all and I'd think they'd want to be accurate about that sort of thing... |
I think that is a bit critical. I just happen to be a Canadian, in Toronto where AN is held, I have been for some 15 years now, I have friends on staff at AN and Otakuthon and have experience in Canadian con running myself (But not directly since 2007).
This entire article seems to just be based on information Otakuthon released cause, well, that's all this article is SUPPOSED to be. It's 'Otakuthon posts numbers' not 'The big picture status of major cons across Canada'. -I- was the one who brought AN into the discussion here in the comments after all. 
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Hiroki not Takuya
Joined: 17 Apr 2012
Posts: 2515
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Posted: Sun Sep 16, 2018 10:58 pm
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^ The update was posted by an ANN staffer and guidelines for reporting and presentation generally suggest providing some additional information for context, which practically all ANN articles have. However, this one is just "the numbers were X" and not being familiar with Otakuthon it would have helped readers like me to add something like "up/down Y% from last year" and wonder that they didn't. When AX is mentioned in about any ANN article, verbage like "the largest anime convention in the US" accompanies. I wouldn't think the comparison to AN or all Canadian Cons would be appropriate actually, but even that helped provide some context...
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Tempest
 I Run this place.
ANN Publisher
Joined: 29 Dec 2001
Posts: 10420
Location: Do not message me for support.
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Posted: Mon Sep 17, 2018 8:06 pm
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| Hiroki not Takuya wrote: | | Thanks Ashley Hakker for filling me in, now why couldn't the reporter or an ANN staffer do that? Not to be too critical, but the CEO and the company are Canadian after all and I'd think they'd want to be accurate about that sort of thing... |
That article was posted as a "daily brief." Daily briefs are sorry articles that are borderline on their newsworthiness. They're just newsworthy enough to post, but only if our journalists don't need to invest much time researching them. Originally the daily briefs were only a sentence or two, but as we've improved all our reporting, the "briefs" are now as long as our regular news articles used to be.
You are correct, the article would have been better work a bit more background, but the staff felt that the time required to do that was better spent reporting another story. Including "briefs" in our coverage allows us to cover stories that we would otherwise just not cover due to a lack of time.
On the Canada note, while our company is registered in Canada, we don't consider the website to be "Canadian Media" in the same way that Maclean's or the National Post are.
In that regard, we're very similar to AskMen (also based in Montreal), Canada isn't a special focus for us. But unlike AskMen, over 90% of our staff and writers are outside Canada. I live in Montreal part time, and I like the Otakuthon people, but Otakuthon is treated no differently from a similar con in Ohio, Texas or Colorado. Unfortunately we have no journalists in Montreal, and we no longer travel to small-medium events, so we are unable to cover Otakuthon, despite the fact that I sometimes personally attend Otakuthon) when I happen to be in Montreal at the right time).
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