Ever wondered how many ACTIVE collectors there are in the United States?

[JunkyJoe]

Originally Posted by AGuinness

A few observations:
I think there are 10,000 registered accounts on this board and about 40,000 on BO’s forum. Not everyone is active, but that’s a good starting point.
I don’t run in a big collector’s circle, but from conversations at the local card show, there are many savvy and experienced collectors who surprisingly not are a part of these two boards.
The population of the US is 325,000,000, or so. If as few as one percent of the country collects, that’s more than 3 million. If only 60,000 people collect, that’s just .018 percent (if my math is right).
Just thinking about the massive sums of money in the hobby (auction houses, eBay, not to mention LCS, shows, etc), and I have a hard time imagining just 60,000 people fueling it.
My best wild guess is that it is in the low single digits for percentage of the population that collects, 2-3 perhaps, meaning about 9 million collectors at the top of the range.


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Thanks for opining. I do have a feeling my "40K to 60K" guess might be conservative. There must be some way to conclude a good ballpark number (pun intended ) using certain metrics...ahh the quest for that magic formula! I guess if we knew the total annual $$$ brought in between all the auction houses + ebay + card shows combined, we could divide that by what we think the average collector might spend in a year. So, for example -- just for some wildly speculative numbers, let's say:

$300,000,000 per year total from auction houses+ebay+card shows (U.S. buyers only, Postwar to 1980 only)

$2,500 per year (avg) spent by each collector

So.... 300,000,000 divided by 2,500 = [?] 120,000 [?] active U.S. collectors

Again, these are just random speculative numbers I'm throwing out there. I hope others can throw in some realistic metrics that we can use.

The way I came up with my original range was:

330,000,000 (approx. U.S. population),
divided by 2 (male/female, sports card collecting is male-dominated),
divided by 5 (mostly 40-60 age group, the U.S. population is generally aged 1-100 yrs old),
divided by 30 (assuming 1 in every 30 males aged 40-60 is an avid baseball fan)
divided by 20 (assuming 1 in 20 of those avid baseball fans is an active Postwar collector)

= [??] 55,000 [??] active Postwar collectors in the U.S.

Of course, without decent metrics to use, it leaves us with some pretty wide ranging guesstimation.