As we approach the end of the year we start to see a picture of which actresses have been popular this year. In particular we get close to seeing all the debut actresses for the year. Soon I'll be starting my 2020 debut posts where you'll be able to see all my thoughts on a number of this year's debuts. Soon we'll be able to see the 2020 yearly data as well. Anyway, let's go see who fared well this month.

Top Actresses

Aka Asuka finds herself up top this month. I'm guessing that means fans enjoyed her and want to see more of her. I'm going to hold off on passing judgement on her quite yet, I'll leave that for my first 2020 debut actresses post that will be coming out very shortly. I think I can, without giving anything away, say fans have seemingly found a Rara replacement. She's topping charts just like Rara was and stands out amongst some more modest chests at S1. If that wasn't enough to make people think Aka is the real deal, she's also on the top 25 for digital sales as well.

Honoka Tsujii continues to do very well for herself. October had a lot of really great releases including her first foray into BBC and a group video starring Kaho Imai, Tsubasa Hachino, and Eri Akira. Getting up to rank 2 seems quite impressive to me and I'm excited to see what the future holds for her. Honoka hasn't exactly been impressive to me in the two videos I've seen of her but she's decently pretty with some nice boobs. Especially with her producing more content and better variety I think there's a lot of potential for her. Who knows if staying at the top of the charts is sustainable for her but I would love to see her continue releasing good content. November's releases look interesting to me, there's a rope duo with Yuri Oshikawa, and although I'm not a huge fan of that type of content I would be interested in watching because I'm a fan of Yuri and have been desperately trying to find something new of Yuri's to watch (a lot of mediocre releases). She also has a duo with Rika Tsubaki for Moodyz that looks great.

This month also saw Nozomi Ishihara finally get dethroned. I can't actually glean anything from her releases so probably people just got a bit tired of her. Including some upcoming releases she's at around 40 releases in half a year. While I'm all for checking out new actresses at some point you do find yourself wanting to watch your favourites again. Among last year's debuts the most times I watched any single debut last year was three times, so at this point I suspect Nozomi fans are feeling a bit burned out on her. I doubt she's going anywhere, simply just seeing the initial hype around her die down a little. Hell, even Nozomi looks a bit bored and annoyed in one of her October releases (kidding, but still...).

BREAKING: @karenkaede_ is currently deleting all her tweets. And when I say "currently", I mean *right now*!!

Reloading each time shows her latest tweets steadily vanishing.

Retiring? 

— ZENRA SUBTITLED JAV (@ZENRAMANIAC) October 13, 2020

Another thing we see is Karen Kaede jumping up a lot on all three lists. Karen started manually deleting all her tweets last month. People were going nuts when it happened and following her progress as she slowly deleted them all. Karen had a release in October and one coming out next month as well, but I think people probably got worried something was up and started hoarding her content. Considering we've seen actresses take down their videos rather abruptly, including some before the five year mark (which is when studios typically happily oblige with the request), it's not surprising people got concerned. She hasn't missed any recent months for releases, and she only had one release in October, so all signs point to her Twitter event being the trigger. I highly doubt she will continue to do well next month once people realize she isn't abruptly retiring, but if she does happen to miss a month I suspect people will get even more concerned and grab a ton of her stuff once again.

We saw relatively few shifts on DMM digital this month and most of the large shifts being uninteresting. Minami Aizawa is an incredibly popular actress who has taken a lot of time off this year, so with her having releases in September, October, and another in November, it's unsurprising that we're seeing her top the charts once again. I would not be surprised to continue seeing her on the list as she continues to release videos. Three releases in a row is hopefully a sign she is back to regular shooting, as a fan I can only hope. IPX-557 was a pretty good video though her other two don't look as interesting. Still, I'm glad she's back at it and hopefully we'll see some good stuff in the coming months.

Miru Sakamichi also jumped up quite a large number of spots. While she's someone who is generally popular and can always score well, this month was actually a special month given she had two releases, including a duo with Shion Yumi. I would wager that is a large reason why she's that popular this month but it really wouldn't be surprising if she continued to have success in future months. She does typically make the top 100 list but not the top 25, so really a single good release could spring her up the list.

Tsukasa Aoi also jumped up the list for a similar reason as she had a duo with Minami Kojima. Again, popular actress with a second monthly release is enough to put them at the top of the charts. I think this is especially true for S1 actresses because they almost always release solo videos, aside from some major group videos at the end of the year plus the single Beauty Venus collab. Kano Yura and Maki Izuna have a collab next month so maybe Kano will jump up the list. There have been 11 total videos starting multiple actresses including someone from S1 this year, some of them the group videos early in the year, so definitely these few duo videos lately stand out.

R18 showed by far the most consistent results. Aside from Karen who I mentioned earlier, nobody was below 50 last month and two thirds of them were on last month's list. For those that don't really pay too much attention to the industry that creates a good list of names to watch. While I like a majority of the names on there I would highly recommend checking out Julia, and you can see my top 10 favourites of her here, or checking out Yu Shinoda, and you can see Panking's top 10 here. If you're already a fan and looking for someone newer, 2018 debut Touka Rinne and 2019 debut Kaho Imai would be my picks.

September saw a number of major shifts that I thought would be temporary so I thought this would be a great chance to see what happened to some of them and in general some of the big shifts. I'm only going to be looking at shifts on DMM because it's too hard to accurately gauge shifts on r18. If I haven't mentioned before, r18 updates their lists more frequently than monthly so it's difficult to accurately assess monthly trends on it. I still always pull data on the first of the month but that data does change quite frequently. As I'm writing this section a couple days later 22 of the top 25 names are still the same, and no name on the top 25 above dropped below 30. Anyway, with that out of the way let's get into some major drops form last month.

Iori Kogawa dropped 62 spots on the DMM physical list, further reason to believe it was her IV for REbecca that caused her fluctuation last month. Iori still being on the list is a good indicator that she is still popular, even if this month's release looks relatively lacking. I think it's a reminder that there are really more than 100 top tier actresses and that things do fluctuate quite a bit, especially on the physical list that tends to rate debuts a lot higher.

We also saw Miu Nakamura drop completely off the list, which I think is to be expected given her erratic shooting. With no November release it's unsurprising she's not on the list. She has actually released a video every other month this year so my guess is that she'll be back on the list next month with a projected December release. Miu continues to be a bit of an enigma, she consistently works for S1, Idea Pocket, and Moodyz, the first two which tend to feature exclusive actresses only. I guess businesses can forgo some of their practices in the face of an actress that is this popular.

Tomoe Nakamura also completely dropped off the DMM digital list, something I anticipated given her last month's video featured anal. So far I don't see any releases for her this month so it looks like that's probably why she fell off. I'm a little bit bummed out (pun intended) that she has no releases this month because I was curious to see if she could ride that success a little longer. I do like Tomoe but more because she's thicc and busty as opposed to her being a good performer, which she is not. I highly doubt people will be as receptive to her in a future month.

Mei Miyajima also dropped off the DMM physical list. It looks to me like she was a one and done debut which is not surprising at all looking at the covers. Her debut cover literally says "however, next time I will retire" and it looks like after three videos that appears to be the case. Most likely she signed a three video deal, which among debuts is actually rather common. Studios often pay more for debuts because the market loves them, so they sign a quick entry deal for 2-4 videos and go from there. Sometimes actresses don't like it, sometimes studios gambled on the actress and think they're not worth keeping on. Who knows if she's gone for good but I would guess she is. This is also a good time to point out why I tend to wait on watching debut actresses. My intention is always to find new favourites (recent years have been quite good for me) and so I always like seeing how their careers play out a bit before watching.

Eimi dropped pretty far on DMM physical, down 51 spots. My guess is it was due to a rather light October featuring something like half the number of releases she had the previous month. The data does seem to show that Eimi's success is less to do with her as an actress and more to do with the speed and quality of her releases. When I compare some top names on this month's list, like Riri Nanatsumori or Aka Asuka, they're literally releasing one video instead of a dozen, so Eimi's success seems to really be a factor of flooding the market. I would say this makes a lot of sense when I think about my own viewing habits. With an actress that freelances such as Eimi I tend to be very picky about the videos or else I'll watch too much of them (and unfortunately that has happened this year). On the flip side, an actress like Hitomi that has just a single monthly video results in me watching the single video and not thinking twice about it. The single video is just more manageable to consume. Eimi isn't going anywhere but it does give us insight into how actresses should be paid. As I mentioned above studios tend to pay more for debuts and with Eimi ranking similarly to Riri and Aka with way more videos you can really see what the pay differences should be like.

Aika Yamagishi dropped 82 spots on DMM's digital list. If I was a betting man I would say it's because her recent releases seem less interesting than her 12 hour video. Her October and November releases both seem themed around her booty, something I think only big fans of hers realize is that nice. I do quite like Aika's ass but it doesn't compare to some of the more recognizable names like Kurea Hasumi or Yu Shinoda, so I think some lesser Aika fans just think these releases are a waste and won't watch at all. Again, that 12 hour release was also just a ton of value given it had a standard video price point, something I'll touch on a bit later on this post.

Top Videos

Unsurprisingly we see S1 doing well across every category, 15/40 spots from the single studio! Three different debuts doing well, especially Aka and their latest Aqua. Also quite a number of more usual suspects from them such as Rara Anzai and Yua Mikami.

KUSE-002 looks interesting as the video claims the actress is a YouTuber. The video itself doesn't seem interesting and I would say the SNS claim is a bit dubious (studios always like to put gimmicks where they can), but who knows. Looks like fans really agreed given the popularity so maybe there is truth to the claim. I don't think the video itself seems very interesting but the prospect of people moving from other industries into porn is extremely interesting. Are we going to see more of this? I'm not sure how enjoyable it is for us English speakers who aren't following Japanese SNS that closely so really I'd call it a wash for me personally.

One thing I've been noticing is how different the DMM digital videos top 10 list looks each month compared to the other lists. It always has a lot of compilation videos up at the top which perhaps gives us some insight into Japanese viewership. My guess is that they love debut actresses and solo videos for the eye candy on the shelf (compilation covers are usually quite awful as I'm sure you can see) but with digital downloads it's always a bang for their buck deal. Especially with 8 hours of VR porn from Moodyz in the 7th spot for DMM digital releases. 8 hours is enough to last several days so I think people are loving the value it has, especially when it's packed with the high quality actresses Moodyz typically has. This release in particular also includes several now retired actresses including Aki Sasaki and Shiori Kamisaki.

That concludes this month's sales post. As always, hope you enjoyed, until next time!