Certain things obviously have weekly sales charts.
Box Office is one. And that’s done across countries, so there’s US (really North America) box office in Variety, Hollywood Reporter and so on. UK box office, presumably India, S Africa and so on.
Records – both albums and singles I guess still now? Main chart, R&B, C&W etc in the US.
Books, hardback and paperback. Fiction, non-fiction. Genre and so on, depending upon how far down one wants to go.
And then it all gets a bit hazy for me. Games perhaps? Is there some officially recognised – or un-official that everyone does recognise – chart of sales? That people look at and go “Oooh, that’s number 1!”?
And what else is there that has such charts?
What I’m looking for are weekly releases of these sorts of things. Something that might then be written up by a newspaper or two (box office most certainly is) and which people tend to search for (box office ditto).
Movies, records, books, what else?
TV programme ratings (BARB in the UK)
Newspapers, ABC.
Cryptocurrency values and transaction volumes.
Sporting attendances? Sporting stats like cricket averages and leading goalscorers.
Market salaries and skills. See ITJobsWatch, which produces discrete rankings and average salaries by skill and role, by sampling job adverts. There are probably others for different verticals. There used to be specialist firms flogging employee salary review services.
Fun fact; football league positions are a discrete ranking, and can be viewed as a basic proxy for individual player skill (and transfer value and wages), and are very often seen as a direct proxy for manager skill, which is a research area itself.
OK, so the rest of this might not go so well, as I have no idea why you’re asking.
Trite answer : Lots of things; most aren’t made available to the general public, only to industry insiders, usually via subscription, probably bundled into the trade papers, which are general market intelligence products. Even for those that are, relatively few are shown as discrete rankings – as there are problems with that, as it can obscure seasonal effects, amongst other things.
NiV’s early comment on the recent food waste thread;
https://www.timworstall.com/2018/08/23/how-guardian/#comment-803470
An awful lot of the well known charts, the Top 40/100, the NYT Bestseller lists, cinema box office, what-have-you, were initially aimed at the buyers working for the retail establishments, not the final consumer*, in order to solve, or influence the potential solution, of that shelf space/stocking problem NiV wrote about.
Books, movies, singles, albums, computer games, football matches – generally they have very short shelf lives, even though the physical product isn’t perishable for decades, the consumer’s spending is highly discretionary, the market can be very tightly bounded, and they’re competing for a generic resource – leisure time.
It can be a bit chicken and egg, but the existence of the chart can produce superstar effects, and alter producer behaviour. Over time, chasing the chart position can make the entire industry brittle, by reducing innovation.
For games try Steam online. They are the main website for downloading games and I believe they operate a chart like that.
Some of the stockbroker sites have charts like that, which stocks are in demand etc. Try Advfn.
Mal Reynolds,
The Steam chart is like the Amazon chart, where it’s more dynamic than weekly.
“Fun fact; football league positions are a discrete ranking, and can be viewed as a basic proxy for individual player skill”
– the player ratings in FIFA/Football manager are generated by actual on the ground scouts, updated regularly and you can buy a commercial version of the data for actually scouting for real life players