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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;GDJMSP, post: 2882358, member: 112&quot;]Personally, I&#039;m with Conder, I think the numbers reported in the article are ridiculously high.</p><p><br /></p><p>However, if you are really interested in making a reasonable estimate you might want to start with contacting the authors of the article to which you referred and ask them how they define a &quot;serious collector&quot;. And then ask them what they based their numbers on.</p><p><br /></p><p>I realize that you probably aren&#039;t aware of it because you&#039;ve only been a member here for a few months, but this is a subject that has come up on this forum and been discussed many times over the years. And in those discussions it has been pointed out how and why it is so hard to come up with reasonable numbers. For example, you suggest trying to count frequent buyers from the different venues. But when you thought of that did you think about how you would need to discount the numbers you arrive at, and why ? It&#039;s fairly simple when you actually think about it - it&#039;s because the vast majority of buyers are dealers, not collectors. And very few dealers are collectors. And when I say vast majority, we&#039;re really talking about the vast majority. Of all the coins bought and sold through all venues about 80% of them occur between 2 dealers. In other words 1 dealer buying or selling to another dealer. And the same thing can be said about trying to use the number of TPG submissions for the vast majority of them are made by dealers too. And that 80% number, that&#039;s a fairly accurate number.</p><p><br /></p><p>So what are you going to count then ? I mean there&#039;s not a whole lot left to count. But there are a few things. You can count the number of people who subscribe to coin magazines for example. There&#039;s 4 or 5 of them if memory serves: Coin World, Numismatic News, Coins, Coinage and the Numismatist. Historically Coin World has had approx 150,000 subscribers, Numismatic News and the Numismatist about 30,000, and the other 2 less than that. But let&#039;s say there&#039;s 4 with 30,000 just for the sake of argument and 1 with 150,000 and round it up and say we&#039;ve got 300,000 subscriptions total. Then we have to subtract some of those because a lot of folks buy more than 1. The subscription numbers are reasonably accurate because they are reported. But the discount, well we gotta guess on that so let&#039;s say 25% and round our number total number to 225,000. </p><p><br /></p><p>Now that&#039;s a pretty low number. But it is also reasonable to assume that if one is a serious coin collector then he/she is going to subscribe to coin magazines, or at least 1 of them. But I&#039;ll grant you maybe not all of them do so we&#039;ve gotta get the number up some more. So what else do we count ? How about coin forums, there&#039;s quite a few: CT, CC, NGC, PCGS those are the biggest and most popular. But, just about everybody who belongs to one also belongs to the others, so again the numbers are repeated, duplicated. And they all report how many members they have. CT is the biggest I know of with about 44,000 members - right now. But over the entire life of the forum we&#039;ve had about twice that number register here, so let&#039;s round it off to 90,000 total. Of that number most, and I&#039;m hesitant to guess at a number for this but given my position here I think I can guess as well as anyone, I&#039;d guess that maybe only 10,000 of them would qualify as a serious collector. I say that because most folks who register here do so for a short time and then are never seen again. Usually all they want is to find out if some coin they have is worth anything. So I think 10k is generous. </p><p><br /></p><p>The membership numbers of NGC and PCGS might be higher when qualifying for the serious label, so let&#039;s just assume they all are. But all the other forums combined are pretty much like CT. So what do we come up with ? Let&#039;s just round it all off and be generous again and say we have 100,000.</p><p><br /></p><p>That means we&#039;ve got about 325,000 serious collectors total based on those things. And again that&#039;s a pretty low number. Not even a fraction of what the article suggests. So where do all the rest of them come from ? OK, we missed some, not every serious collector subscribes to coin mags or participates on coin forums - but how many ? If you look at the numbers at any given time we&#039;ll have anywhere from 50-100 members online and about 250-300 guest reading the forum. The numbers are there for all to see. But how many of those are serious collectors ? All we can do is guess, but to be generous and not leave anybody out let&#039;s triple our total number of 325,000, when we do we end up right around that 1 million number that Conder101 mentioned.</p><p><br /></p><p>Could we be high, could be low ? Yeah, but how much ? I sure as heck don&#039;t think it could be by a factor of 10. I mean the numbers are the numbers and that&#039;s what we get.</p><p><br /></p><p>Is there something better to count ? Maybe, but if there is I don&#039;t know what it would be. I&#039;ll sure listen to suggestions though.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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