Which iconic Transformers name has led to the most toys over the years?

[griffin]

During the loooong process of updating most of my collection pages for the first time in 10 years, one of the things I've done is work out who else has the most Transformers toys named after them... to make up a "top 10".
And with an extra five months of toys (the previous numbers were up until the end of July, which was before the Bumblebee Movie toys came out)... I've recalculated the first six, and as expected, Bumblebee went up a bit, but still nowhere near Optimus.


Once again, this is just using the official toys and figurines from my collection, which totalled 6,698 at the end of 2018, and from that, these were the number of each toy that I had in the collection...
8.898% - Optimus/Convoy (596)
6.032% - Bumblebee/Bumble (404)
3.598% - Megatron (241)
2.568% - Starscream (172)
1.836% - Grimlock (123)
1.269% - Ironhide (85)
1.165% - Ratchet (78)
1.135% - Soundwave (76)
0.970% - Jazz/Meister (65)
0.896% - Hot Rod/Rodimus (60)
0.732% - Prowl (49)
0.582% - Shockwave/blast (39)
0.552% - Jetfire (37)


The thing that surprised me was Soundwave - I see Soundwave as the more significant, popular character in the original series, but he dropped down to 8th, with Ratchet and Ironhide having more toys, thanks to the Movie Universe.
One reason I didn't use the annual toy checklists is because I would have had to include the large number of identical toys that were released in Japan last year (and in some previous years), which wouldn't feel right if they were essentially the same toy in different packaging (like American and European packaged toys).

One thing I found interesting is that I now have over 400 different Bumblebee toys... now THAT would be a big wall of yellow if I ever got them all together.

Well... here are the answers.

This is only a rough result, but since I don't focus on or discriminate against certain characters, the stats from my own collection (which is a fairly decent sample size at 6,515 toys and figurines from Hasbro and TakaraTomy), should be pretty close to the percentages you would end up with if you counted all Transformers toys ever made. (the bigger an unbiased sample size is, the more accurate its results would be to the entire populace)

Of the most iconic character names to have existed in toy form since the first two years of Transformers, these were the six that I thought would be the most prolific - Optimus/Convoy, Megatron, Starscream, Bumblebee/Bumble, Soundwave, Grimlock.

Their percentages in my collection (and total number in brackets), in descending order...

8.92% - Optimus/Convoy (581)
5.76% - Bumblebee/Bumble (375)
3.59% - Megatron (234)
2.52% - Starscream (164)
1.83% - Grimlock (119)
1.12% - Soundwave (73)

That would mean, that if you had all of the different Transformers toys ever made, there would be about 9% being some sort of Optimus... and about 6% being some sort of Bumblebee.
That also means, just those six character names, have given us almost 25% of the entire history of Transformers toys.