Who Buys Yaoi?

As a follow up to my recent post about our top search terms, specialK was wondering about the demographic split for Yaoi titles - recently the word is the 4th most searched for term on our site - even more than 'hentai'. We've always had a general feeling that the audience for Yaoi is mostly female, but we've never done any kind of formal analysis on it and specialK's comment raised my curiosity, so we pulled the data for the last 200 orders that contained at least 1 'Yaoi' or boy love manga item and did some database sorts.




First, we simply counted the number of female vs. male names (obviously there will be some margin of error as some are more ambiguous than others), and we found that buyers were:

67% Female
33% Male

Then, using the same name data we sorted the list in terms of Shonen Ai vs. Yaoi titles. Around the office we refer to these titles two different ways: titles for audiences 13 and up is classified as 'Shonen Ai' (boy love), and for 18+ only audiences as 'Yaoi' (explicit content). Here's how that turned out:

Shonen Ai

79% Female
21% Male

Yaoi:

56% Female
44% Male

(Customers that ordered both Shonen Ai and Yaoi on the same order were counted in both categories.)

So you can see that the audience changes a bit when we break the titles out by age rating, with guys buying more of the explicit titles while the gals are favoring the romantic stories that leave more to the imagination. Of course these stats are not scientific, and the data would be more accurate if we choose a larger sample, say 1,000 or even 10,000 orders, or if we had included DVD data, or sorted the list better - but we just didn't want to stay up all night trying to figure out if 'Jordan' or 'Taylor' is a guy or gal.

In the end, I really don't think it matters much anyway.... :-)