One of the most powerful things about AMV Tracker is its ability to give you in-depth statistics, graphs, and charts that tell you things about the data you’ve entered into it. This can allow you to identify trends over time, as well as to pinpoint the specific things that you like and dislike in AMVs. The functions in the Statistics module are only as powerful as the data available in the database, however; therefore, it is recommended that as you build your database and enter videos into it, you be as detailed as possible and provide as much information as you can on each video. This will give the Statistics modules enough data to work with to make things interesting and insightful.

With all that said, let’s take a look at what each of these functions does in turn.

Quick
Here you’ll find a number of easily accessible functions that allow you a quick look at various parts of your database. In order:

Quick stats: A snapshot of your database that shows the total number of videos/unique editors in your database, some averages, and the most common tags found across all videos you’ve entered.

Addl. stats: Some additional stats similar to the ones above. On top of this, this view provides a matrix that allows you to choose from a dropdown menu in each row, representing some element of data in your database (editor name, AMV genre, year released, etc.). Selecting something in each dropdown will then display the count of videos that meet the selected criteria, the total % of your database those videos make up, along with the average My Rating, Star Rating, and duration for those videos. Please note that each row here is independent from the others.

Quick graphs: This presents a graph that shows the count of videos based on a video element that you choose. For example, choosing “Year” from the dropdown will show the distribution of videos over time.

Drill down by tag: This allows you to choose three different tags, and see how certain metrics change as each tag is added. This is best illustrated with an example:

In this case, my Level 1 tag is “horror”, so we see in the L1 row in the bottom half that there are 168 videos in my database with the “horror” genre tag, as well as some averages for those videos. The second tag I’ve chosen is the “instrumental” General Tag. Adding this tag shows that, of the 168 horror videos in the database, 34 of them have the “instrumental” tag as well. It also appears that I’ve rated that particular subset of horror videos higher than the average of all horror videos. Adding a third FX tag, “psychedelia”, to the mix, it appears that there are only 5 videos in my database that have all three of these tags (and apparently the psychedelic tag brings down my average rating of videos from those that are only “horror” and “instrumental”). By default, the “L1+L2+L3” row difference columns will show the difference between row 3 and row 2, however, if you want to compare the bottom row to the top, just click the checkbox:

This function is useful for getting really detailed with seeing how different tag combinations affect these few metrics. If you find that you especially like drama videos, for instance, you can use this feature to determine what specific things you look for in drama videos, or what kinds of things can ruin drama videos. A couple things to note:

(1) You can use any combination of any type of tags here — although in the example above I used a genre tag, a General Tag, and an FX Tag, you could combine three different General Tags if you wanted, for example.

(2) On larger databases, this may take a few seconds to run as you add tags.

Favorites: This module allows you to see, based on your average My Rating score, what your favorite things are as they relate to AMVs:

The dropdown on the right is the minimum number of videos that must have a given element in order to be considered. So, in the example above, another way to think of this is: Of the editors who have at least 30 videos in my database, whose videos have I rated the highest on average? The answer, it would appear, is PieandBeer. Or, of the anime which have been entered at least 30 times into my database, which videos using those anime have I rated the highest? And the answer here is End of Evangelion with an average rating of 7.01/10. In this example, there is no musical artist which has at least 30 AMVs to their name in my database, so “N/A” is displayed.

NOTE: For larger databases, this may take a few seconds to run.

Count by…
These buttons all do the same thing, in that they show a distribution of videos; however, you can choose two criteria: the first is the x-axis, the second is a filter to only show a subset of videos. Let’s look at an example. We’ll be counting videos by My Rating, so clicking on the My Rating button will set the x-axis to be a range of values from 0-10. After you click the My Rating button, you’ll be shown this screen:

In this case we’ll be choosing “Genre”, and then at the bottom, we’ll choose “character profile” from the dropdown. Clicking the “Show Graph” button will display this:

…which shows the raw count of character profile videos that I’ve assigned to each My Rating score. However, there is another way to display this data as well. Going back to the previous screen, you’ll notice a “Normalize graph” checkbox:

Checking it and then clicking the “Show Graph” button will show a very different distribution:

What this tells us now is, instead of a raw count, the percentage of each My Rating score that has been assigned to character profile videos. So, in the example above, of all videos in my database that I’ve assigned a 6.5 score, 35% of them have the character profile genre tag. This view is much more informative if you have an uneven distribution of videos across the chosen x-axis.

NOTE: If you choose “Genre” as the x-axis, you’ll notice another checkbox that says “Exclude ‘FX’ genre tag”. If you click this, “fx” will not appear on the x-axis as a genre. This was done as it may not be thought of in the same way as the other genres used throughout AMV Tracker are.

Averages
Next you have a few options for displaying averages from your database; you can see average duration, My Rating, and Star Rating. This works similarly to the above graphs, but is backwards — the first button you click will be the metric being averaged, and the second button will be the x-axis. In this example, we’ll look at average duration. So, clicking the “Duration” button will bring up this window:

We want to look at the average duration by genre, so let’s click the “Genre” button:

…and as you can see, a graph appears showing the average duration in seconds (y-axis) based on each genre (x-axis). As you would expect, trailer videos tend to be a lot shorter on average than any other genre.

Heatmaps
The final statistics functions to look at right now are heatmaps. A heatmap allows you to choose a different element for each axis, and where those elements intersect in your database, a colored square will be generated. The darker the square, the heavier the concentration of videos that have both elements in them. Let’s take a look at several examples, all of which will have the x-axis as the year, and the y-axis as the genre. First, we’ll look at a raw count:

NOTE: If you choose “Genre” as an axis, you’ll be able to check the checkbox that says “Exclude ‘FX’ genre tag”. If you click this, “fx” will not appear on that axis as a genre. This was done as it may not be thought of in the same way as the other genres used throughout AMV Tracker are.

NOTE 2: If you choose “Year” as an axis, you’ll be able to check the checkbox that says “Limit lower year bound to 2000”. This will make it so that only videos released in 2000 or later will be included in the heatmap.

As we can see, the heaviest concentration of videos appears to be drama videos released in 2019. From this particular example, you can also tell there’s a significantly larger number of videos overall in the database starting in 2014, regardless of genre (that being because that was the year I started making my Top AMV lists, for those interested). You’ll also see here that I don’t have a lot of parody/trailer videos in my database (because I don’t tend to like them or seek them out) or dance videos (I have a specific standard for what I consider to be a “dance” video). Looking at the color bar on the right can give you an idea of the approximate number of videos represented by each square.

There are other ways to display this same data, though; let’s take a look at what happens when you click the “Count as % of x-axis” radio button:

The same set of videos as above is being counted here, but instead of a raw count, it’s now being displayed as a % of the x-axis. Another way of thinking of this is, what percent of videos released in a given year were assigned each genre tag? So, for example, we see that in 2003, 2006, 2016, and 2019, some ~55%+ of the videos released in each of those years were drama videos. The heavy blue that stretches across the “drama” genre shows that, regardless of year, most videos entered each year seem to be in the drama genre. You’ll also notice that 2006 seemed to be relatively light on “fun” videos.

Let’s take a look at the other count option, “Count as % of y-axis”:

In this example, what percent of videos with a given genre tag were released each year? This view once again confirms that my database is pretty backloaded from 2014 on — of each genre shown on the y-axis, there’s a heavier concentration starting in 2014. You’ll notice that most character profile videos recorded in my database were released in 2019 — sentimental too.

Besides just counting videos, though, whether expressed as a raw number or a percentage, we can also look at My Rating and Star Rating averages. For My Rating:

A few obvious dark spots here show that I must have really liked parody videos (or, knowing my preferences, probably just a single parody video) in 2012, horror videos in 2010, and dance videos from 2006-2008. Similarly, for Star Rating, which is an indicator of what other people like:

…it’s actually rather similar to my own ratings, with highly-rated dance videos from 2006-2008 and good horror in 2010 and 2003. You’ll note that there are no entries past 2016 — this is because Star Ratings are all but a dead metric on AnimeMusicVideos.org, which is where this data comes from, and people aren’t recording Star Ratings anymore, or at least not in a high enough volume to be reliable. So this data is most useful on older videos from the .org.