Size of Pin Collecting/Trading Community

Laura and I have been exchanging few e-mails lately, mostly about life, kids, summer vacations and of course Charlie Sheen

One of the interesting points she brought up in her e-mails was about the size of pin collectors/traders community, so she got me wondering.

How many collectors/traders would you think are world-wide in this hobby of ours?

Maybe to be a little more specific, I should add people who buy say at least 5-10 new releases a year and actively trade via postal mail and/or in person in the parks, during the events etc. Say at least 10 trades a year maybe?

Is there a way even to start to guess-timate how many of us are there??

If I remember correctly, Dizpins had something like 5,000 members at its height. Currently there are just over 4,000 members on this forum (with this being the largest Disney Pin Trading pin forum); however the "active" users (I believe the number of users who have used this forum over the last 30 days) is 937.

My guess is the "active" pin trading community has somewhere 1500-2000. This is not counting "lapse" traders or those who buy pins as souvenirs.

kajtdd

The pin trading community seems like a very small community by your standards (which are reasonable) -- Plenty of casual people "trade" (after all, it's called pin trading) but they probably only know about trading with cast members; for example, my nephew/niece started pin trading about a year or two ago, but really only trade with cast members, and maybe a few odd people here and there. I imagine that's the extent of trading most people do (as kajtdd mentioned, the souvenir buyer types). Though i'll say it's been great seeing the forum grow with more and more members each day, and getting more people introduced to online trading/trading by post.

There are TONS out there that only lanyard trade. There are also tons out there that collect and don't trade. Many are afraid of the trader with people out at the parks. There has been so much talk about "Sharks" that is scares people away. I try to always have a little cork board out with a sign that says any pin for any pin. It is simply my lanyard fodder so pin for pin doesn't really matter to me. Even the "lanyard traders only" will trade with me. Every day someone will tell me... we like you... you are easy to trade with. I feel it is important to let them know we are not all sharks. That some of us just love to trade. I absolutely LOVE seeing a persons face light up when I have a pin they have been looking for and I am willing to trade with them. To me that is what pin trading is all about.

As far as how many fairly serious traders there are out there? TONS would be my answer... LOL

in which case, having edition sizes of 2000 or so would make everyone happy. lol. But destroy that value of our "special" pins. I like this topic. It tells me I am in a special class of "geek."

:angel:

Cicada said:

Plenty of casual people "trade" (after all, it's called pin trading) but they probably only know about trading with cast members

Click to expand...

Yup! I am counting them as active traders too, for the purposes of this topic it does not matter to me who trades with who as long as they actively show interest. CM trading is very active trading IMO

Which brings me to my next question:

kajtdd said:

Currently there are just over 4,000 members on this forum (with this being the largest Disney Pin Trading pin forum); however the "active" users (I believe the number of users who have used this forum over the last 30 days) is 937.

Click to expand...

What is the active criteria for DPF? Logging in once a week? Posting every month?? How do we define this?

And just because someone is an active member of the forum does not mean that they are still collecting/trading. They also might be selling off their collection and on their way out.

Jabberwocky said:

I think there were about 250-300 or so people at the D23 at WDI event this weekend - many of whom I knew and many of whom I didn't. And at least 150 (or more) always show up for big DSF releases. A few hundred for DLR PTNs, etc. DLRP events seem to reportedly get a few hundred people.

But I think I've read that the WDW events get something like 1500 people attending? If you figure another similar, maybe slightly smaller amount who are active pin traders but don't get to the events, there are probably something like 2500 or so people actively trading (beyond park visit trading) worldwide, i would guesstimate.

Click to expand...

That has to be low. The Annual passholder pins that are LE3000 sell out, the Castle Key sold out after a few weeks and I don't know many traders with extras which leads me to think those are mostly owned one at a time. There have been LE5000 and LE10,000 pins in the past.
Think about how many lanyards you see on guests at the parks everytime you go. Busy days have near 50,000 people, I bet at least 1 in 10 or 5,000 have lanyards of some kind, half of those have pins on the lanyard. Assume over half are tourists that go once a year, no multiply that half times 365 days a year. Those aren't the AP traders that show up all the time, which there must be over 3000 AP's at DLR alone that collect actively and over 1000 that are "hardcore." Maybe 500 that are extreme (All on this forum! haha!) I mean, there were LE3000 pins at Cars Land that were limit 1 and they sold out in hours.
I'm guessing over 50,000 worldwide have lanyards and wear them at the parks. Over 75,000 actively collect LE's or HM's And I'm guessing there are over 100,000 people that consider themselves pin collectors/enthusiasts, even if they only buy just one pin per visit. People that own a few pins from trips and don't really know about pin collecting proper? Over a million. 300 Million people alone in the U.S., I think more than 1 in 300 have a Disney pin of some kind in their house. Worldwide? Who knows? I trade with people from Japan, India, Australia, all over Europe.

I wonder if Disney even knows this answer? Or what their estimates are?

I'm not sure I think it is as high as Mark suggests, but I do think it's higher than the previous guesses.

There are still some high LE releases for Annual Passholder pins, and events like Flower & Garden. And that's just one resort. I'm not sure how many people attend the Paris events. But we probably have no idea how many international pin traders exist, because most don't participate on English speaking websites. Most of my Pinpics requests come from people who aren't regular posters, and when I attended the few Epcot events most people I talked to (in board lines) didn't trade online, or follow message boards.

I think there is still a big gap between die-hards, such as the regular posting group here, and the more casual group who may make a few Pinpics trades a year or none at all. On my first go around with online trading 2000-2004, I was lucky to make 5 trades a year, if there wasn't a state pin release and people needed WA pins. There are 1000 active members here, but I'd say maybe 200 post. So it wouldn't surprise me if there were a couple thousand active Pinpics accounts (most only used for inventory; not trading), but then need to account for all the non-English speakers who don't have accounts.

Stateside, I may guesstimate maybe 20-25K people with collections they are trying to build (ignoring the extremely casual HM, give my kid something to do traders), with the majority being people who buy or trade in-park/events only. Maybe double that worldwide. With the majority's activity in their locale's pins only.

I think people say about 1K attend WDW PTN. There is going to be some turnover. It's not the same 1K at all events. So maybe 2-3K unique people, over a year. 1-2K in DL for their events. So 3-5K attendees stateside. Double to account for international, and people who can't make events (like me). Still 6-10K.

Edition sizes are tricky, because in the old days people would buy everything. Now, everyone knows you have to be specialized. How do you sum up all the Up, Tangled, Alice, Peter Pan, Theme Park, Holiday, Mickey, Donald, et all collectors?

Jabberwocky said:

The original post was asking about current people who trade at least ten times per year and buy at least 5-10 new releases a year, so that excludes the casual traders in the parks and tourists trading for hidden mickeys off of the cast lanyards. Obviously including casual buyers/tourists, the number would be much higher or the line of merchandise wouldn't make sense to continue. Ah yes, missed that part. In that case the numbers are lower but I still think above your estimates.

But just actively trading pins as a regular hobby - i.e. buying or trading online, through the mail and at pin events - at least ten trades a year per the original post, is how I came up with the guesstimate. It may be a little higher, but I don't think by much. We are a small (though worldwide) community. I wonder how many trade requests pinpics sends out daily? I get at least 5-7 a night and I have 220 pins for trade.

As to the LE3000 pins - those can sell out to 1500 people, plenty of whom may not be pin collectors, just AP-holders who wanted a souvenir and also bought a t-shirt, a litho, a keychain, etc. The days of LE5000 and LE10,000 pins were over many years ago. PODMs may be LE2000 but I'd bet only a few hundred people buy them all up - many of those for profit, not for trade, so I wouldn't consider those "active traders" either. PODM sell out to probably 500 people but those 500 people have off loaded (trade or sold) a fair share of them to final collectors. Wasnt there a rumor before about HM edition sizes? I wish Pinpics would add an "Owns" number to pins. So we knew how many people have them.

Click to expand...

Red responses

Merryweather, thank you for such an interesting topic to discuss. My curiousity was peaked at last year's September trading event. 90% of the people I talked to had never heard of the message boards that are out here. Most had heard of Pin Pics, though. I also talked to a lot of people who were collectors only. I also found it interesting that there were so many people from outside of Florida at such an expensive event. It all lead me to believe that the on-line community is very small compared to how many actual traders/collectors there are. I don't think estimates in the 20,000 range would be too high.

Thank you everyone for their responses so far.

One really interesting point that was raised above is "What does Disney estimate" or do they even know ?? And if I can take it a step further, do they even care ?? :lol:

It just started as a simple curiosity from our recent e-mails but I can sense a dissertation topic for a business or marketing student

I think at this point, I will place us somewhere around 20-25K mark largely, does this make sense? There might be pure collectors along with collector/traders.