An interesting news article came up on Canned Dogs a little while ago, which listed many of the Shonen Jump animes and their average TV viewership in Japan. Interestingly, Shaman King ranked in at 8.5% of all people in Japan while new episodes were being broadcasted. Taking the 2004 estimate of 127,333,000, that means about 10,823,30,517 people, on average watched the Shaman King anime. Compared to the highest Code Geass R2 rating for a single episode was 4.0%. So, clearly Shaman King was fairly popular back in 2001. This year the original Shaman King anime series is being released on three separate boxsets, the first of which has already been release, and the second will be released on the 22nd of this month.

It’s also worth noting that Shaman King beat popular series such as “Bleach” and “Naruto.” Their averages were most likely skewed, because of their larger number of episodes than Shaman King. For a complete list of the animes in the list, visit Canned Dogs.

(Source: http://zepy.momotato.com/2008/10/02/average-tv-viewership-in-jump-anime/)