Key Takeaways
- Jujutsu Kaisen is the best-selling manga of 2024, followed by One Piece.
- Oricon charts only track printed sales, not digital, impacting rankings.
- Manga consumption peaked from 2020-2022, showing diversity in sales trends.
Oricon revealed the list of top-selling manga in 2024, in which Jujutsu Kaisen features as the best-selling manga series this year, followed by One Piece. This is not the first time Jujutsu Kaisen is in the first position on the yearly chart, as the series has already done it in 2021 and 2022.
Last year, Blue Lock topped the ranking, and Jujutsu Kaisen was in second place, followed by One Piece. It is important to note that the Oricon chart is about printed sales, not including digital ones. This information is important to understand the numbers.
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The best-selling manga in 2024
According to Oricon, Jujutsu Kaisen sold 7,610,995 copies, and One Piece sold 5,250,210. Other series included in the top 5 are Frieren, The Apothecary Diaries and Blue Lock. Haikyu!! is in 8th position, an impressive mark for a series that ended in 2020 (but the movie probably affected sales positively).
From 2008 to 2018, One Piece topped the top every year. In 2019, Demon Slayer broke the “combo” and was the best-selling manga series of that year. Since then, One Piece has never topped the chart again, but has always been featured in the top 5. This all indicates changes in consumption patterns among manga readers, indicating more diversity and competition among series. Up until 2018, one established series dominated sales, but now different and new series are topping the charts.
But the numbers have been weird. In 2019, One Piece was second place, selling 10,134,232 copies. In 2020, it was third place, selling over 7,000 copies (Demon Slayer was first with an unmatchable 82,345,447 copies sold and Kingdom sold over 8,000 copies). In 2021, Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer and Tokyo Revengers all sold over 20,000 copies each (Attack on Titan and One Piece sold over 7,000 copies each). In 2022, all the top 4 series (including One Piece) sold over 10,000 copies. Last year,Blue Lock sold over 10,000, followed by Jujutsu Kaisen (over 8,000,000) and One Piece (over 7,000,000).
What this all points to is that from 2020 to 2022, manga consumption reached a peak, maybe affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, and now numbers seem to be dropping to a pattern similar to the numbers we’ve seen from 2013 to 2018. This could have many causes: eventual loss of interest from the public, diffusion of readers (the manga market has more readers, but they are reading different things, so sales are not too centered on any specific series) and maybe a change in consumption format. Oricon manga charts are based on printed sales, so if readers are buying or reading digitally, Oricon cannot assess these numbers.
What is the Oricon chart?
The Oricon chart is an estimate of manga sales based on information Oricon gathers from bookstores and other shops. Thus, Oricon charts do not necessarily reflect the whole reality of Japanese sales, but they are a good source to understand the market. For this reason, their numbers can differ from official publishers’ numbers — however, publishers are generally worried about copies in circulation (which are the copies the publisher sells to stores, so this is usually the transaction in which publishers make money), while Oricon tries to estimate actual sales to final consumers.
Oricon charts are estimates based on information gathered from bookstores and other shops, they are not based on official numbers shared by publishers.