One of my favorite topics.
Old Judge cards were immensely popular with the boys of the 1880s. I'd like to refer to an excerpt from Dave Jamieson's "Mint Condition".
This is a "must read" for those curious about Old Judge popularity at time of production. Dave Jamieson did some fantastic research here which alone is worth the purchase of his book.
http://www.sportscollectorsdaily.com...-distribution/
Goodwin's peak production of baseball cards would be realized in 1889. Records show that in that year they produced 168 million cigarettes. Ten count packs were common (higher counts less so) with perhaps ~20% (total swag on my part) of total production sold in US, packaged with an N172 baseball card (remainder containing N171, N174, N164, N165, possibly N162, and others). These numbers would suggest somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million N172s (pending take rates of 10 vs 20 count packs etc.).
Survival rate has not been very good. There are tough cards from every year of production, the cards were not produced in equal numbers. I believe there are many poses and even players (California League players for example) that have been lost to time. Population reports for the players that have survived range from unique to maybe 300-500 (on the high end, SGC has a population of better than 100 grade entries for Tim Keefe - split between 9 poses). I agree with Jay and several others on current population. I've looked at it from a couple different angles and I just don't see there being 100,000 cards surviving. While the most common players/poses could hit that average required to arrive at 100,000, most of the players/poses are far rarer.
There are a small number of significant collections. Several private and publicly held collections exceed 400 players with even less making a significant run at all the poses. I believe the top five collections in the world fall short of 10,000 OJs collectively. The next 20 holdings likely also fall under 10,000 OJs collectively. After that you are getting to the smaller team and other subset collectors or just a small random sampling with, on average, fewer than 100 cards. If I add all the numbers up and double them you could hit 50k cards but I believe that is a stretch. I like the range of 30-50k cards existent.