In an interview published on the Comic Book Resources Website last Friday (see 'The Chair'), Marvel COO Bill Jemas released a set of dollar order numbers for August 2001 and August 2000 for the top five comic publishers, saying they were 'directly from Diamond.'  We were surprised that Marvel would be in possession of sales figures for its competitors, purportedly from Diamond, which has indicated to us in the past that it is obligated to keep such information confidential. 

 

We asked Diamond VP-Marketing Roger Fletcher whether the numbers were indeed provided by Diamond.  He told us, 'When they say these numbers came from Diamond, that's not accurate.'  We asked if Marvel had access to Diamond sales information for other publishers, and Fletcher responded, 'No they don't.'

 

Fletcher speculated that Marvel had used its own order information and sales info released publicly by Diamond (e.g., market shares and Diamond indexes) to derive the numbers that Jemas released.  'The information that we put out is by agreement with the publishers that we represent and more specific information is proprietary to the vendors and Diamond.  We can only assume that the information that we publish was used to guesstimate the numbers given to the Comic Book Resources Website.'

 

We also asked whether Marvel's numbers for its and other publisher's sales were accurate.  Fletcher said they were not.  'The numbers are not necessarily accurate,' he said, 'but I'm reluctant to comment on how they are inaccurate.  It's not a safe assumption even that the Marvel numbers are accurate.' 

 

Here at ICv2 we're very familiar with the type of analysis Marvel attempted, since we use Diamond's publicly released information and publisher-provided info to do our own analysis (for ICv2's analysis of August 2002 dollar orders and comparisons to past years, see 'Comic Orders Awesome in August').  It appears that Marvel took a wrong turn in its calculations, and in the attribution of their source.