I voiced my concerns regarding new sections of the forum in the last survey and I believe that now is an opportune moment to bring my two cents. I will focus on the Manga section not only because it is the one being discussed right now, but also because it is the one I have (had?!) some 'experience' (and with 'experience' I mean that I used to read about it, don't misunderstand this!).
First, I would like to say that I haven't watched the industry closely for the last few years, so some things I will say might not be true anymore. Anyway, I believe that the Manga industry discussion is more prone to be personal and emotive than Video game discussion. To explain why I believe that would happen, we need to look into the difference between the cycle of a manga and the cycle of a video game:
A Video Game is developed for years under secrecy; they are then at some point announced and the marketing starts with trailers, gameplays, demos, events, etc, then it eventually comes out. Generally, pre-release discussion regarding video games resolves around pre-orders, hype, trailer reception, marketing volume, etc, and then, when the game is out, depending on more personal experiences, we can discuss if a game can do well further than its first week or not because of WoM or something related. Judging if a game did well or not is a bit more grounded, since we look at sales, rankings, shipments, players, MTX revenue, etc.
A manga is initially published in a Magazine and, unlike a video game, we have full access to what is going to be sold in volumes from day one. You usually can't play the Level 1 or 2 from a video game before it come out, but for mangas you can read it exactly as it will come out for sale later, this alone already leaves some room for discussions like "I think that the sales of the next volume of manga X will decrease because chapter Y destroyed the whole series", and while chapters being good or bad obviously do influence sales, can lead to multiple pages of personal opinion on chapter Y that has not much to do with sales.
Going forward, the production of a manga volume take some time, but there is generally a rule for Weekly Magazines that is "The future of a series might be decided by the chapter 7", I won't go into the super specifics of why this happen (I'm not even sure if I know lol), but magazine have something called Table of Contents (ToC), that is arbitrarily decided by the editors of the magazine, so while it is not necessarily a ranking of popularity, series that rank higher usually are the ones that the department want to give more promotion. The ToC ranking of new series is usually unconsidered until chapter 7, but if a series ranks in the lower part (bottom) of the ToC after that, there is a great chance that the series already is on watch to be canceled.
Then, the volume comes out and we can get some idea of how it is doing, either by looking at Oricon Top 50 numbers (usually only for bigger series) or Shoseki Rankings estimates. but here comes another twist: Sales are not everything for multiple series. A good example of that are Jump Gag series, often misunderstood and hated by the western community for surviving despite not being big sellers (and because these series usually does not fit their tastes) but having great internal popularity (Jump readers votes) that is enough to let them live. To give a practical example of that, Spring Weapon No.1 survived for 1.5 years in a far more competitive Jump lineup despite not being a great seller but having enough internal popularity (we learned that from the Popularity Contest good number of votes, iirc). Another practical example is the recent Phantom Seer, that was canceled despite being an OK seller. But how do we know if a game is popular internally or not? Well, ToC is our best guess, but it does not tell the full story, just like well established gag series used to rank in the very last position of the ToC despite being popular (I think they don't do that on Jump anymore, though), so a lot of times we might never know. Of course, internal popularity is only one of the many factors that might influence if a series is doing good/will survive or not. Marry Grave, for example, was originally canceled by Weekly Shounen Sunday because it was not popular enough domestically, but the author received proposals of keeping the series going because of the big popularity of the series overseas (it got licensed in many countries). Jump have a big base worldwide nowadays that probably influences on their decision making.
After the volume is out, the manga cycle restarts.
Anyway, I wrote too much and my original point might be a bit confusing now, but what I meant was that the Manga industry is pretty nuanced and it can be hard to keep strict sales talk. I'm not against a section talking about manga, but I think that, more than ever, we, as a community, will need to policy and moderate ourselves so that we don't cross the line between personal opinion and sales-related opinions, otherwise the moderation team will have a hard time.
Regarding recommendations for the forum, I'm glad that
@Rouk' was already mentioned because they were the first person I recommended to helping on the manga side in the survey (seriously, everyone should check their amazing
Oricon sales database), but I also know that
Sakaki does a great job covering the Shougakukan (more focused on Sunday side) and
Josu_ke does a great job with infographics, but I don't know them personally and have no idea if they would be interested in participating here.
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