I am trying to find the revenues generated through anime, manga, films, merchandise sales, and video games for all popular anime.
I tried googling it and I found a 9.8 billion figure, but I have no idea where the information comes from and I need the sources for a research paper I am going to write.
How can you get sales figures for anime? Is there a reliable source for these things?
You're going to have to do a lot of legwork on sites like this, referencing first Oricon and any other entity like Square Enix or Pony Canyon, etc. you may feel is relevant to your research, probably looking at their more easily quantifiable figures like music sales, subtracting non-anitune sales and moving to divisions which deal with anime production.
Anime is definitely a multi-billion-dollar-a-year industry in Japan, they spend a huge amount of money on entertainment and that's easy to verify with Google. The specific figures are probably going to be tough to pin down because with digital distribution, figures are not all kept in one basket like how hardcopy sales used to be.
You could also look into something specific like what Netflix anime market share is in Japan, that might be an easier target to hit than to try and pinpoint the figures for the anime industry in its entirety without doing major digging in the crates.
