news | April 08, 2026

Pokemon DVR Ratings Thread | Bulbagarden

Except it doesn't, because DVR recordings are far from being the only options fans have to watch the show. If you want a quantitative method of interest in the show you're also going to need to get a combination of regular TV ratings, YouTube streaming numbers, Hulu streaming numbers, Amazon Prime streaming numbers, and illegal downloads. DVR ratings by themselves don't tell us much of anything.

No, it means "oh, the show's on YouTube now, I can just watch it on my phone now instead of having to DVR it every week."

Don't get me wrong, the data in this thread is nice to have. But let's not kid ourselves into thinking it comes even close to giving us the full picture of how many people are watching Pocket Monsters in Japan.


I get where you're coming from, but including illegal downloads as well? That's like saying Nintendo should include download numbers for Citra (a 3DS emulator) in their sales data for 3DS consoles.

As for DVR not including all Japanese viewers; while that is true, it still has a big enough sample size (research papers show that adoption rates of DVR in Japan is strong). Take current presidential national polls as an example: they might not survey/poll every single citizen and have some inaccuracies (looking at 2016), but they still provide a general picture of who is leading. Sometimes there's no way to get the full picture, so a general picture is what we have to settle with.

But maybe one would argue that DVR doesn't even provide a general picture. Perhaps they don't sell to a certain demographic, or perhaps they don't broadcast all shows on TV. If it comes down to that, at the very least these ratings show rise and fall of interest within the platform itself. If that's the case, then whether or not that trend extends outside of DVR is up to interpretation.

In fact, we can see this exactly with Video Research Ltd's viewership ratings. Even though after the timeslot change, Pokemon SM has almost completely disappeared from the top 10 rankings, in actuality there is roughly the same amount of people still interested in the anime.

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New week, new update, same old situation with rankings.

Once again, 10th place this week is Yokai Watch Jam. Maybe we're seeing a comeback for this spinoff series (probably not)

Actually, the biggest news this week is that tvguide has revamped the way they present DVR ratings, and it seems that they have wiped everything from before April 2020.

Luckily, I have the data for past DVR ratings saved on my computer, but unfortunately now there is no easy way for people to verify the ratings I post for Pokémon SM...

This sort of mirrors the situation with Video Research Ltd's viewership ratings, where they continuously remove ratings from older years; by now, the only easily accessible records we have for anime tv ratings from before 2017 are from animenewsnetwork.

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Hey guys! It's update time!

Now I know what you're thinking, you're thinking that there is no way that Pokémon is appearing in the top 10... But You're Wrong!

Boom! 1st place overall with 100pts, beating even Doraemon, the most popular thing on DVR during the week of 18/05/2020 - 24/05/2020!
Even on the regular Video Research Ltd's viewership ratings, it managed to get 11.8%; that's more than 1 in 10 people in Japan who were exposed to Pokémon that week! Now that's popularity!

The catch is... Pokémon did get first place, but not for the main anime. What got first place was actually the special TV broadcast of Detective Pikachu.
This is really wild, because TV broadcasts of the Pokémon anime movies have never gotten that high in ratings before (Usually around 3-5% on Video Research Ltd's viewership ratings if I'm not mistaken).

Since Doraemon got 70.3pts on the overall rating, that means Detective Pikachu roughly got 142.2pts in terms of anime DVR ratings; that's more than twice of what Pokémon (2019) normally does, and more than 5 times of what the rerun episodes are currently doing. (This is not an apt comparison, this is just to give you a rough idea of how crazy good Detective Pikachu did)

So what's different for Detective Pikachu compared to the TV broadcasts of Pokémon anime movies? For starters, it aired on Nippon TV instead of TVTokyo; in addition, it aired on a Friday at 9pm instead of replacing the main anime in their timeslot. This really shows that Pokémon has so much brand power in Japan, it's just being squandered by TVTokyo in their decision to dump the anime onto Sundays against Chibi Maruko-Chan.

(Once again, I know viewership ratings don't matter; but simply moving Pokémon to Fridays by replacing Yokai Watch Jam would absolutely let more kids watch the anime)

As for the rerun of Pokémon (2019)? What did you expect, of course it missed out on the anime top 10, with 10th place once again going to Yokai Watch Jam.