eMoviePoster.com

This is Part 2 of a two part article. Be sure to read Part 1.

In Part 1, I ran a 17 year old article about estimating the current size of the movie poster collecting hobby. In it, I stated why I thought there were then (in 1998) roughly 5,000 "serious" collectors. Now 17 years have gone by. How many "serious" collectors do I think there are?

First, we need to define "serious collector". I am NOT referring to those who solely buy a poster or two, but rather those who are into collecting where they buy posters at least once a month, and likely have 100 or many more items in their collection. On that basis, I would guess there are around 10,000 "serious" collectors, around double the amount there were in 1998.

Why the increase? The Internet surely played a big part, allowing collectors from different countries to find each other. I think this estimate is very accurate, because we have had around 10,000 active registered users for the past few years, and as new have been added, an equal number of old-timers have dropped out.

Why aren't there hundreds of thousands of collectors as there are with other hobbies, like baseball cards, comic books, stamps or coins? Because of two reasons. All those collectibles were originally sold directly to the public, and there are many millions of each out there. But movie posters were NEVER sold to the public, so they are many times more rare. The second reason is that there are almost no shops that sell movie posters, especially the brand new ones. Those not only bring a lot of money into the hobby, but they also help create lots and lots of brand new collectors.

Will movie poster collecting remain a relatively small hobby forever? I don't know, but return right here in another 17 years to see my then-latest prediction!