Future Of The Hobby Discussion At Stampshow

Chinese stamps are subject to a LOT of speculation, so you can not draw a conclusion that ther number of collectors there is still growing if prices go up.

Hi!
Stamp collecting is one of my most time (and money) consuming hobbies. The others - model railroading & mechanics - have a lot of similarities in their historical popularity and standing. Both reached their peaks in the 1950s, gradually went downhill in popularity over the following years, and today, the majority of participants are (IMO) well over 50 years old.

To garner the attention and enthusiasm of today's youth (say 10 - 30), these hobbies can't successfully compete with electronic gizmos and games. Sadly, I've seen this with my own kids (50,50,48,47)and seven grandchildren. None have any real semblance of interest in participating in these hobbies, even though the opportunity and my willingness to involve them has always been there.

Even my adult friends have "attitudes" about the hobbies - thinking them to be both time and money wasting. In fact, any meaningful discussions I want to have about the hobbies take place on internet forums like this one.

All that said, I firmly believe the hobbies are strong and have enough "worth", to keep them viable for decades to come. And while the newcomers are not at the level of the 1950s, they are there and we need to do all we can to help them along.

ENJOY !!

The stamp hobby can be expanding dramatically but APS can be shrinking because APS may not offer some anything these expanding participants view essential (needing access to a library, expertizing service, generalist magazine, selling/buying stamps through APS, any social aspects like at shows, etc). This is the APS problem.

I see the topical area (disney, star wars) as the most likely to attract general collectors.

Al

Mobilman44,

Your post was spot on, especially regarding under 30 crowd with gadgets and gizmos.
And thus the answer we are looking for to expand the hobby lies within the computer, and not just the home computer. It has to be mobile, small, carry in your pocket small.

Digital albums and displays, scanning album pages and arrangements, digital library etc.

If a 28 yr old has a stamp album, he surely wants it on his iPhone. He wants to move the pictures around, zoom in, software to analyze... He wants to bid on stamps on his mobile phone. He wants to create exhibits and album pages on his phone at Starbucks, not in the basement.

I think we will get there over next 20-30 years but unfortunately it is slow process

Rg

Surprised these people don't know what they are talking about ..............a lot of guessing and self-interest at the stamp show discussion . Do these people plan anything past the next time they go to the bathroom ? Let get serious here .Their thinking goes up the next stamp show and what they plan to sell .
Looking at trends and market direction is better for people in advertising and those who trade the Futures Markets .
What you want to know,.........what is going on in the future with stamp collecting ......We will see two important changes in the next few years .
The first is catalog pricing , the old method of price discovery was DEALER PRICE LIST and offers made by stamp dealers in advertising . Well that has been dead for the past few years and now the catalog publishers are in a no-mans land to pricing and what price up or down they can use . So the catalog publishers are using the SAME-OLD-SAME METHOD . Raise the prices a nickel or a dime here or there and a buck or two each year or once every two or third year . A slow steady uptrend keeps everybody happy .
But what is going to happen is somebody is going to design the ALGORITHM that is going to capture real time price changes and final prices ,then that's were the catalogs are going to have to accept the real world price . Some one like Amazon who collects massive amounts of data from user behavior and will start publishing prices .
Then in the future we will get another guy like H.E.HARRIS who got stamps into the publics hand thru cereal boxes or mail order free-bees . It will combine with a another Captain Tim who offered stamps with a purchase of soap. But someone will figure out how to get millions of stamps into the publics hands . My guess is one of the fast food resturants is going to use it to fill up those empty dinning rooms after 6:00 pm with stamp clubs that educate kids and bring them together and get their face out of a smart phone .
The key here is to get millions of kids doing it at the same time out in the open and not 3 or 4 kids in a church basement with 4 or 5 older people pushing free stamps on them .
Also none of those speakers address the issue of inflation in the future and what that can do to both stamp prices and the desire of people to buy physical assets and that includes stamps .
There, time for me to stop drinking so much coffee ,I think I am wired up now.

floor - have you even been looking at the Scott catalogs? There re plenty of US and worldwideh stamps that have had their catalog values lowered. It is not a uniform slow steady uptrend.

My guess is the stamp market is too small for a behemoth like Amazon to trifle with. If stamp publishing (and stamp software design, etc) was attractive to "major players" as Amazon and their ilk, we'd probably already have them. I assume that Amazon, ebay, Wal Mart, Microsoft, etc have strategy meetings where they discuss potential new markets. However, I have a hard time imagining that anything associated with stamp collecting will be discussed at such meetings anytime soon. And by "anytime soon", I basically mean "ever", or at least within my lifetime. Someone will probably do it sooner or later, but it will likely be by smaller players.

Both ebay and Delcampe already provide APIs (programming interfaces) that provide somewhat unlimited access to all current auctions/sales. So anybody (with proper skills) can pretty easily write a piece of code that fetches and stores specific info on every auction/sales that happens on these major platforms..

The major headache however is (and will be) that there are as many external factors as there are sellers/buyers. Say you start tracking US Scott #235 and within a month you've recorded 450 different sales ranging from $1 to $150. They all are real world prices, but things such as condition, grade, quality of photo, seller policy, seller reputation, time of sales, weekday, month etc. have varying affect on the final result. Even if somebody manages to build an algorithm to include and weight all key factors, then the next major hurdle would be copyrights. Very likely Amos (and other publishers) would fight till last drop of blood to prevent any competitive catalog that uses (or utilizes) their precious copyrighted numbering scheme from entering the consumer markets. And when/if you finally get to point of releasing the product, how many of us collectors would be prepared to pay/subscribe such a service (especially if the cost was far higher than few bucks).

It's nice to dream of 'technological advancements' but I fear this hobby of ours is not ready for the required changes.

-k-

Yes but it's more qualitative than quantitative like PSE want to make us use.

PSE want to create a need that don't exist for more than 100 years.

You sort this mess out with multiple linear regression if you've got the data.

Some things can be expressed numerically. Centering? The microns of horizontal shift of the perfs towards the design, ditto vertical. Perfs? The number of torn, the number bent. Color? The nanometers of wavelength in the color shift. Damage? The length, in millimeters, of each crease & tear, as well as the area (mm) of each stain, or the percent of the design covered by that stain, and its opacity. And, of course, the ever-valuable seller's feedback percentage positive.

You can use 0/1 variables for things like original gum, disturbed gum, and hinge remains. And a 0/1 for the presence/absence of a certification from each certifying agency, along with time elapsed since the cert was issued.

Of course, the more expensive the data is to collect, the fewer stamps are worth the expense ... death spiral!

If we don't collect more than price & date of sale & used/unused - the stuff easily gleaned from catalogs - then, as Keijo points out, we will have a homogeneous data set representing a heterogeneous reality, which was the basic design flaw in The Domino Theory.

Cheers,

/s/ ikeyPikey (who got a B+ in advanced multiple linear regression)

Since one cannot search specifically by catalog number (except in the general title), any data retrieved would have to be "scrubbed" in order to be useful. For example, ebay USA lumps the entire German sphere into the "Germany and Colonies" category. A search for Germany Scott# 17 could potentially pull up Scott 17 from Danzig, Saar, Memel, Allenstein, Bavaria, etc. On top of that, it would also pull up Michel or Gibbons #17 from any of those areas, or indeed any other listing where the seller put "17" in the listing title (such as a $17 CV, etc). Searches can be tweaked to get more useful, but it's nearly impossible to consistently get search results that contain only the information you are looking for while leaving out all irrelevant results. Automated tools can certainly help, but there is still going to be a significant manual component.

Pulling results from ebay Germany would be more useful as their categories are much more specific and search results are much more precise, but it would still require human eyeballs to weed out irrelevant results. I mention Germany because I'm familiar with it, but the same situation happens with a lot of other countries as well.



Particularly when we can just search sold listings on ebay and get this info ourselves for free. And let's also not forget that there just won't be usable sales info on individual stamps for vast swaths of the catalog - particularly low value items that aren't usually sold as individual stamps.

Edited to add that catalog prices (at least for Scott, anyway) aren't all that far off the mark if purchased under the criteria for Scott pricing - namely a fault-free VF-centered stamp purchased froma full-service dealer. I really don't see a need to reinvent the wheel, personally. I do want catalog publishers to improve their digital offerings, but I really don't think they need to make drastic changes in terms of their values or how they arrive at them.

I have some saved searches and material often is in the wrong spot and details like grading, etc. is not consistent.

Al

However, It is against the ebay API user agreement to display or distribute any information or trends older than 14 days without purchasing an expensive license to do so.

Been there, read that?

The big point we miss I think when ballyhooing about the policies of catalog publishers is that the most important thing about a catalog is NOT the prices listed, but rather the role catalogs play in identification of a stamp that can then be used in the marketplace to negotiate a fair price.

Scott or Gibbons could replace prices with ratings of R (for rarity) and give a range of values from common as mud (R) to only one known (RRRRRR add Rs until you create the highest category level you wish). Collectors would still know what stamp everyone refers to when referring to USA Scott #5, even if the catalog did not put anything more that a rarity guidance for the stamp.

In the end, if you want to break the monopoly of the catalog producers, the international collecting community will simply have to come up with a new system of stamp identification that would supercede the proprietary systems currently owned by Scott, Michel, Gibbons, Yvert etc and which impose more than a bit of a handicap on making the stamp market a truly global marketplace.

Perhaps this is something the Federation International de la Philatelie should look into. It has already developed a numbering system for new issues (starting in 2002 IIRC) but its in the classical era stamps pre-1945 that having a universal standard of identification would be the most helpful. Of course, Catalog Publishers will not like it, but given the rapid internationalization of the philatelic marketplace, having different and non-similar idenfitication systems really in an inhibitor to growing the hobby on a global basis.