Dragon Ball Daima Viewer Survey Results: Part 5

How did Dragon Ball Daima viewers rank the show in relation to the other Dragon Ball series?

Here are links to Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 of my Daima Viewer Survey.

Dragon Ball Daima Anime Ranking

In my Daima Viewer Survey I asked participants to rank Dragon Ball Daima in relation to the other Dragon Ball anime series, from highest to lowest.

This is called a ranked choice vote.

1,128 out of 1,182 participants (95.43%) chose to rank the series.

This is because some early participants expressed difficulty with the mental task of completing this section, or said they hadn’t seen all of the series in the franchise yet and felt frustrated by this task, so I gave participants the option to skip it.

I then added a note that instructed every subsequent participant that if they had not seen a series yet, to not rank it. This would contribute zero points to that series.

Here are the results.

Dragon Ball Anime Rankings – All Ages (1,128 Votes)

1	2	3	4	5	6
Dragon Ball Z	Dragon Ball	Dragon Ball Z Kai	Dragon Ball Super	Dragon Ball Daima	Dragon Ball GT
67.67 pts	53.125 pts	36.77 pts	29.31 pts	28.66 pts	19.28 pts

Dragon Ball Z was the highest ranked series, in 1^st place (with 67.67 points).

Then Dragon Ball (53.12 points) followed by the refreshed Dragon Ball Z Kai (36.77 points) and then Dragon Ball Super (29.31 points).

Dragon Ball Daima earned 5^th place (28.66 points).

At the bottom was Dragon Ball GT (19.28 points).

Ranked Choice Voting

Let me explain how ranked choice voting works.

Given that this survey had 6 options, each time a participant ranks an option in 1^st place, it scores 100 points; a 2^nd place option scores 50 points; a 3^rd place scores 33.33 points; a 4^th place scores 25 points; a 5^th place scores 20 points; and a 6^th place scores 16.66 points.

Then, the total number of points is divided by the total number of votes, and the options are ranked from highest to lowest.

If a participant excludes an option from their ranking, the option earns zero points. But only 1 person chose to skip voting for a series: ignoring DBZ and DBZ Kai, in the Age 29 to 44 demographic.

Keep in mind that everyone who took this survey had seen Daima, with 92% of them having completed the series by the time they took it.

Analysis of the Anime Ranking

Everyone loves Dragon Ball Z, but I did find it surprising that DBZ would be 14 points ahead of Dragon Ball in a relational ranking.

Likewise, that Dragon Ball would be 17 points ahead of Dragon Ball Z Kai, given that Kai is a refreshed version of DBZ. We see here that fans don’t like DBZ and Kai equally. In fact, Kai is much less liked than DBZ.

At a glance, Super and Daima appear to be equal. And in regard to the results over time, for the first two days of the survey, Daima was in 4^th place, 1 to 2 points ahead of Super, but by the third day, Super pulled ahead and stayed there. No matter how many more people voted, Daima remained in 5^th place. That said, Super is only ahead of Daima by 0.65 points.

And it’s no surprise that Dragon Ball GT was ranked in 6^th place, but it is surprising that GT is 9 points behind Daima.

To explain why, we have to look at segmentation of the results by age.

Dragon Ball Anime Rankings – Age 1–15 (20 Votes)

1	2	3	4	5	6
Dragon Ball Z	Dragon Ball Daima	Dragon Ball	Dragon Ball Z Kai	Dragon Ball Super	Dragon Ball GT
54.33 pts	44.08 pts	38.66 pts	38.25 pts	36.16 pts	19.91 pts

We see here that children rated Daima as their second most-favorite Dragon Ball series! It’s placed below Dragon Ball Z and above Dragon Ball.

This strengthens the argument that Daima was made for kids, not adults.

Yet Dragon Ball GT remains at the bottom. Even most kids don’t like GT. (Sorry, GT lovers!)

Age 16–28 (605 Votes)

1	2	3	4	5	6
Dragon Ball Z	Dragon Ball	Dragon Ball Z Kai	Dragon Ball Daima	Dragon Ball Super	Dragon Ball GT
65.80 pts	51.11 pts	40.36 pts	30.15 pts	28.81 pts	18.71 pts

Here we see that this age range likes Dragon Ball Z the most, while Daima is ranked in 4^th place, 1.3 points ahead of Super, as a flip of the overall result.

Age 29–44 (484 Votes)

1	2	3	4	5	6
Dragon Ball Z	Dragon Ball	Dragon Ball Z Kai	Dragon Ball Super	Dragon Ball Daima	Dragon Ball GT
70.73 pts	56.20 pts	32.83 pts	29.16 pts	26.05 pts	20.10 pts

We see that this demographic loves Dragon Ball Z, followed by a tremendous score for Dragon Ball. Then the rest get sorted far below those, with Daima in 5^th place, 6 points behind Kai and 3 points behind Super.

Age 45+ (18 Votes)

1	2	3	4	5	6
Dragon Ball Z	Dragon Ball	Dragon Ball Super	Dragon Ball Daima	Dragon Ball Z Kai	Dragon Ball GT
62.96 pts	53.61 pts	42.22 pts	31.48 pts	20.46 pts	15.46 pts

A similar score for Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball as the previous age group, but with a surprise drop for Dragon Ball Z Kai down to 5^th. This means older fans like Super and Daima more than Kai.

Dragon Ball GT is Always in Last Place

As you noticed, Dragon Ball GT was ranked in dead last place by all age ranges.

There are many fans who liked GT in general, as proven by the fact that all demographics except 45+ scored it a few points above the baseline minimum of 16.66 points for 6^th place. And I’ve heard stories from fans around the world who love GT.

But we can see that all fans in all ages like every other series more than GT.

If Tōei had bothered to do a survey like mine before starting Daima’s 6-year-long production that cost millions of dollars, they would have discovered that most fans don’t like Dragon Ball GT—They like Dragon Ball Z.

Looking at Daima from a business perspective, it’s bewildering that Tōei would choose to make a new show “in the spirit of Dragon Ball GT” that was intended for adults but could also be watched by kids, when my survey shows that adults don’t think it was intended for them and they didn’t watch it with kids.

Just imagine how much more successful Daima would have been if Tōei gave most fans what they wanted.

Instead, Tōei made a product that most fans didn’t want!!

Meanwhile, fans have been screaming at Tōei since 2018 for them to continue the Dragon Ball Super anime, with them failing to do so. Although there are legitimate business reasons for Tōei not doing so, including the complicated ownership of rights to the series, they apparently can’t negotiate their way out of that problem, and it’s frustrating.

So this international mega-corporation with 77 years of experience and billions of dollars in revenue from the Dragon Ball franchise alone failed to do market research into their target demographic, failed to do basic product-fit analysis, and failed to build a product that people wanted.

Yet despite all that, most fans liked it! Including me!

Why did Tōei do this?

Maybe Akira Toriyama created Daima on purpose with full awareness of these above viewer preferences.

As I write about in my Dragon Ball Culture books, Toriyama is a self-described contrarian who likes to disappoint people on purpose. By following what I have coined “Toriyama’s Rule of Opposites,” he goes out of his way to make people upset and do the opposite of whatever they want to see or are expecting. And by the very nature of doing so, he makes people like it (even though they shouldn’t). So if it was deliberate, he succeeded!

With this data in mind, it’s astounding that Daima performed as well as it did. Any new series with such a terrible product-fit mismatch—and that wasn’t built on such a great foundation and decades of world building—would have failed on day one.

And the poor pacing and execution of the ideas—however great they were—would have turned adult audiences away before they finished the series.

I’m left to infer that Daima’s success must be a testament to the lifelong dedication of Dragon Ball fans, the spirit of Akira Toriyama, the incredible animation, voice acting, sound effects, and that catchy intro.

Yet no matter how successful Daima was, it still isn’t as liked as Dragon Ball Z.

As I’ve proven, it’s not even close.

Conclusion of Part 5

What do you think of these ranking results from my survey?

Come back for Part 6, where I’ll reveal the complete demographics of the people who took this survey and provide more segmentation analysis of the results.

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