Future Of The Hobby Discussion At Stampshow

The video of a Linn's News "State of the Stamp Hobby" in Grand Rapids posted on youtube. It was an reasonably interesting discussion based upon a series of questions posed to the group. With the approach it never really made an assessment of the hobby (more collectors, more dealers, etc).

I noticed a number of comments were focused on APS and recruiting for APS as part of the responses almost like a pre-req for growing the hobby. Can the hobby grow without a growing APS?

Of course, ideas like somehow Linn's is going to share their mailing list or the USPS is going to give special rates to APS to promote the hobby will never get far.

Anyone else watch the video?

Al

This may make it a little easier to answer your question...

It was an APS show and meeting, I assume that is why there was focus on APS's role. First impression, mostly older white men all with commercial interests in the hobby. This may or may not reflect a more hobbyist perspective. Many appear to be backing away from the recruitment of kids and want to focus on the '35-45' year olds. I assume that this is a dealers perspective, 35-45 year olds certainly have more disposable income then kids do. They also all mentioned the importance of the internet and based upon some of the comments, they were in on the ground floor. (?)

I find it interesting(?) that APS is posting videos on You Tube instead of trying to bring the traffic to their own site. I find it interesting(?) that they apparently feel that the future, regardless of the age group, is all about being online.

Yet APS has done little to internally grow any Information Technology (IT) resources, instead outsourcing this expertise and hardware. Too many people thought this was simply about 'the internet' instead of understanding it was about IT.

So I come away from all of this confused. If the future is so dependent upon IT, and if so many folks saw this coming 'since 1998', then why was there not more resources and emphasis being applied to IT over the years? Putting the 'early adopters' issue aside, APS certainly understood the future by 2010 when they wrote the Into the Future strategic plan which outlines the reliance upon IT. My apologies to Gandhi …. 'First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then they act like it was their idea'.

The IT boat was missed and is still being missed. APS should have hired a IT executive/'doer' and been establishing the "go to" web site 15-20 years ago. Their IT person should have been monitoring the server logs and pushing to implement things that increased the amount of time that users spend on the site. (Many people incorrectly think that the number of visits are very meaningful. But having a lot of visitors who spend less than a minute on the site does little good.) Which pages do visitors most often leave on? Which are the most referring sites? How much time and money is being spent on SEO? Has anyone ever seen any of this discussed at APS?

Holding roundtable meetings to discuss this topic and outsourcing faux IT is not going to cut it when so much depends on it. It takes risk, money and investment. When I see APS moving in this direction, then I will know that they have finally begun to properly embrace the future.
Don

I got turned off after watching the first 5 minutes of the video when the first guy on left from some company said "grading" was the most important thing to push hobby forward. Amazing the difference between dealer perspective and collector perspective!

I agree that not grading, but internet access and internet technology is the most important change in the hobby. Whether its on-line resources for educating, reference certified material to compare stamps, online auction houses from ebay to Robert Siegel to buy stamps, on-line guides for stamp identification, community boards like this one, etc. This stuff has made collecting so much more interesting and fun for me. Scanning high resolution has also changes my ability to analyze stamps in ways I never thought I could at home. I would like to see APS have online software to allow perforation analysis, gum analysis, even watermark analysis in the future. The at-home forensics of a stamp using a simple scanner, without spending thousands of dollars, has made collecting fun for me.

There are fewer enjoying philately now than 30 years ago-- certainly grading has not helped get people into stamp collecting. I do agree that grading has made me stare for hours at all my stamps, making me wonder if any will score 95 or above. In the end, other than staring harder at centering of my stamps, grading turns out to be a big disappointment to many collectors. It turns me off from the hobby. The consumer (collector) should make the determination of what is XF vs. Superb, not these companies. Lots of disappointment in philately. Most collectors get frustrated with the grading results. It stinks when you think you have a 95, only to be told by some guy its a 90.

Common scenario: typical guy/gal who picks up his/her album started as a kid or left to them by a parent.
She thought that she had a very fine (80) centered stamp from the 1800s, only to find it grades only a 75 because of centering. That lady is now down 35$ for grading and shipping. Then she goes on ebay, sees an inferior looking copy to hers, and its selling for 300$ more because it graded 80 versus 75 (generally owned by a major dealer who advertises on PSE websites)--- Now that is the girl that will close the album and say... this is too difficult.

Realistically each demographic needs a different solution to attract people to the hobby and make it interesting to them. The needs or wishes of the casual younger adult collector are different from the older, well-heeled and serious collector, and different from those of a young child, etc.

Grading isn't the least bit important to me personally, and I'm certainly not going to go into what stamps should be graded or whether it's actually necessary, etc. However, grading or some sort of standardization probably is, in fact, important to making stamp collecting an attractive hobby to a well-off, retired doctor, for example. High-end stamps cost a lot of money, and most people aren't used to laying out 3, 4 and 5-figure sums for items with a nebulous value (for lack of a better term). People spending 6 and 7-figure sums to build a collection are going to want to know they're getting value for their money and can recoup as much (or more) of their investment as possible. They're going to want to know they're not overpaying for a given item, and that means certification, grading and standardization.

But, as others have said, having as much as possible online is something common to all demographics and types of collectors. I do almost all of my buying and selling online and I may well live the rest of my life without meeting another single collector in person. The more I can do online, the more I'll enjoy the hobby, period.

As best I can remember: "Today's collectors know less & less because of grading." - UK numismatist

Spending thirty-five dollars on each stamp is so much easier than spending thirty-five hours on each stamp ... only to be left with your own opinion, based on little experience and, hopefully, even less confidence.

People are too busy to learn the minutiae of forgery & fakery and, besides, that is such an ugly topic ... why not just hand-over the co-pay, and let the doctor worry about your test results?

Besides, so many high-earners earned high grades in college that it is only natural that they should want their stamps graded, too.

It is no wonder that grading is such a big part of the hobby today, and I applaud anyone who learns to live without it.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey

To me. the APS website content is not that attractive for causal collectors. It has mostly internal focus - staff, society news, how to use services listing. etc. I consider the stamp store an exception.

It is not like going to Stamp Smarter, PNC3. or USSS where there is specific information about a specialty.

The challenge is that APS is am umbrella group and not a specialist society so reasons for joining a group can be different. I want more web delivered education. I do not attend shows any more unless they are within a days drive, exhibit, use the library, etc.

My role model is yale free courses. No fancy production costs, elaborate staff or IT person, etc. - just a lot of information.

I am not saying I liked this course but this is the idea. I had watched the religious studies courses.

The future of the hobby IS here. Grading must be a Yankee thing, we don't really do that in Canada. I always read that stamp collecting is dying and how can we engage more people in the hobby yada,yada,yada. I go to the stamp shows, auctions and buy from e-bay and I don't see it dying, on the contrary I see Stamps and lots going for nutty prices. I see hundreds of stamps being sold on e-bay everyday. The hobby is evolving as it always has. The number of stamp collectors has been declinining since the baby boom entered middle age, understandlable and predictable. I don't have the stats to back up this claim but I believe that the proporation of population who collect stamps as a hobby has remained static.

Perhaps a longer view is needed to put things in perspective. Just speaking about the US here, I suspect it's probably true that a smaller percentage of the population collects stamps than did, say, 30 or 40 years ago. But it's still probably a higher percentage than collected, say, in the 1920's. Maybe the popularity of stamp collecting for a few decades in the mid 20th century was an anomaly? Maybe we're just regressing back to the mean after an era of abnormally high participation in the hobby, perhaps due at least in part to the high profile collecting habits of a popular American president (and British Monarch, etc). I really have no idea if that's actually true or not, it's just a hypothesis.

Stamp collecting was very popular in the US in the 20's, and even more so in the 30's. Lots of literature, newspaper articles, and Nassau Street attest to that, plus more commemoratives issued, etc.

I don't know about the future of collecting in general, but in my little City we have a strong club that keeps growing. Our shows, which we hold twice a year are small but well attended and we always get a few people stop in that are not collectors. A few of us mentor young collectors, offering them our spares and supplies to get them started.

I love this hobby as does many of my fellow club members. Several of them have prize winning exhibits, one of which has won internatinal awards. She will be at the New York show.

I dont worry so much about grading. I just like filling the pages in my album, most of which I print myself. I dont' have a fortune to spend on stamps but through trading and by attending local stamp shows I have managed to accumulate a decent collection. I don't know how much it is work nor do I really care. What I do know is that I love to collect.

Just my 2 cents worth.

Dianne

I was in attendance at this presentation. I would have liked to have seen a non-commercial representative on the panel, but of course this was a panel put together by Linn's, and the commercial side of the hobby is what pays for advertisements in Linn's. And, of course, dealers make shows viable and have a pretty good handle on what the hobby looks like.

My personal view is that grading is not a major market force, though I should note that I'm primarily a postal historian and don't really collect classic US as such. I do think that there is a segment of the market (or potential market) for whom grading (and the authentication that accompanies it) helps ease concerns or to provide a certain degree of confidence that something is what it is, but grading and liquidity in the stamp market will never be anything like the coin market (where, of course, grading and slabbing comes from).

In terms of APS videos, why NOT put them on YouTube where they might be found by others in addition to those who would be looking for them on the APS web page?

I do think there are many people out there who are interested in stamps but who haven't been reached through traditional channels. I am on the tail end of running a $100 Facebook ad campaign for the Garfield-Perry March Party, which starts tomorrow. This was targeted not only to people interested in stamps, but also to people interested in art, history, postcards, geography, and homeschooling. The real test will, of course, to see who comes in the door at the show, but based on the event responses and "likes" that have been generated from the ad campaign, the demographics of who can be reached via Facebook are very different than what you see on most stamp show floors.

My thoughts
I found the video interesting, although like some of the others, found the first comment a little strange. Here are some of my thoughts about the state of Stamp Collecting

STATE OF THE HOBBY
When people say that Stamp Collecting is dying, or at least fading, I am not sure I agree. In fact, I believe that it is exploding. If we look beyond the borders of the US/UK and Canada. we find that in places like China for instance, it is growing leaps and bounds (that is why Chinese stamps have jumped so much in price lately).

Look at places like Brazil, Mexico, India, etc. Emerging countries where the middle class and people with disposable income and more free time, Stamp Collecting has taken off. Just look at the huge influx of dealers on ebay and DelCampe from around the world - it is very diverse and international. People seem to worry about the state of collecting in the US, but we need to take a more global perspective.

IMPORTANT CHANGES
Grading???? To me it is such an obscure part of stamp collecting, primarily for investors of mint US Classics stamps.

No one grades their collection of Maps on Stamps or TinTin stamps. No one grades their WW collection, or their postal history collection or their cover collection or their postmark collection, or collection of Machins, their pre-cancels, their WW1 or WW2 collections, their Italian colonies stamps ..... you get the picture.

Philately is so diverse.

THE FUTURE OF THE HOBBY
As stated by most of the speakers, the growth of the internet is the greatest change, and if we don't take advantage of it to its fullest extent, stamp collecting will indeed die. We need to do things like:

• Webinars
• Virtual Meetings
• Create modern looking, responsive (those which work well on mobile devices and tablets) websites. Most of the sites, including my own look like they were designed in the 80s and 90s.
• Create online magazines which aren't stuffy and full of interactive articles.
• Create dealer and auction sites which are modern and easy to use (think Amazon)
• Online Exhibits which are interactive and educational

I could probably go on, but it APS or Linn's want to be successful, their business model probably needs to get with the times, or think about how to take advantage of the future (VR anyone?)

I wonder if enough attention is given to cover collecting as a way of increasing interest in philately. Philately is not just stamp collecting. Merge this with topical collecting, as well. The topical collecting forum here seems to be thriving. Collecting topically on stamps, and those stamps on covers, has the potential to pique an endless variety of interests. But how do you get this "out there" for people to see and experience? My experience is limited, and geographically constrained, but I don't see a lot of exhibits at shows focused on topical exhibitions. The ATA is trying to stimulate interest, but how serious is it taken by mainstream philately?

The issue is that they are sending people off the APS site, which might not matter much since it isn't really setup to intrigue, educate, or capture non-members. In fact, the current length of stay average for the APS is under 5 minutes. I would imagine if they analyzed the non-member traffic it would be half of that. The average length of visit for this forum is 12 minutes, Stamp Smarter is about the same.

I would also guess that the opening APS page is the one that a lot of non-members leave on. If so, this should be speaking to them.

This forum has had a push to get posters to embedded You Tube videos. They want people to stay here instead of leaving for You Tube. When people go to You Tube they are presented with all kinds of other, distracting videos. (You Tube is also trying to get people to stay as long as possible.)

APS web site has a good rating and a fair amount of traffic. They could easily turn this into much more by increasing the length of stay. For example, with an increased length of stay they could sell more ad space for higher amounts of money. (Also adding another reason to join since they could allow members to turn off the ads if desired.

But I am afraid without a true IT person on staff none of this is understood or promoted internally. They probably think that a simply having a 'web presence' is enough. APS needs to understand what they are competing with online.

And keep in mind that IT is not just 'all things online' but rather extends to all kinds of other projects and resources. One thing that APRL has invested in is the digitization of many philatelic works (when in public domain). But an IT person would insist upon the development of a much better profit center by offering these for instant download after a user pays. (As opposed to waiting a day or two to do something kind of email exchange.) Members and non-members should be able to find, pay for, and download in real time. But not having it setup this way APRL/APS is missing out on income on their investment of the digitization.

Point is that IT is a much larger ball of wax and one that is required for any organization that has the long term strategic plans that APS does. It is like an organization saying that their future is dependent upon a delivery service but failing to invest in any vehicles, mechanic, or garage. I am mystified as to why the membership is not questioning the outsourcing of IT given the strategic planning.
Don

Sorry for the double post but I wanted to add something about grading. I think we all do grading on our stamps. We look at a stamp and decide if we like it or not. Is it worthy to buy or worthy to add to our collection? We have many threads in which folks post images of their stamp and basically ask for opinions on it. Paying for a piece of paper with a grading opinion is the commercializing of this process.

In some ways I understand why there is a need. The market has plenty of bad stamps and covers and new hobbyists face a bigger challenge than before. A 'bad' dealer can stay in business far longer online than they would if they were a brick and mortar.
Don