How many collectors are out there?

I've been thinking about this for a bit, and a response to an article I wrote today had me thinking. How many collectors are there truly out there? After I said there may be between 200-500 NNOF Thomas RC's, someone said they doubted it was nowhere near 500 (which he may very well be right), it got me thinking. Here is my response:

You may be right, however, I think sometimes we vastly underestimate the # of collectors out there and the # of Topps cards produced + unopened. The psa population report currently shows 173 of them and bgs shows 87. Whether that is the lion's share of them or a sliver of them, I'm unsure. All I know is that I've never sent anything to be authenticated before.

On a different note, I've been thinking about how many collectors there are out there. For example:
The psa population report shows over 2,700 PSA 10 89 UD Griffey rookies. These currently fetch between $400 and $500 each! I couldn't imagine there are that many collectors out there to support this price, but they are selling, and surely this # of psa 10's will continue to go up.

Even more eye-popping is Jordan's fleer rookie. Nearly 2,500 psa 9's in the population report yet they are going between 5-6k. WHAAA?? This has really opened my eyes to thinking that we collectors aren't just a group of 150 nerdy adults scattered all around America

Just as a bonus: psa pop report on the famous '52 Topps Mantle? 1,177!

So, how many collectors do you think are out there? 500? 5,000? 500,000?

I don't think there is any correlation or connection between PSA population reports and the number of collectors.

The average collector isn't buying PSA 10 Jordan rookies and '52 Mantles. Those are high-end collectors with a lot of money or investors. And there are a lot of them.

But the number of normal traditional collectors outnumber them exponentially, so there's no way to estimate the amount of collectors based on graded card numbers or rare errors like the NNOF Thomas.

How many former collectors do you know ? That number will be very large . I turn down buying collections now , since inventory is over 650,000 . Sadly no Jordan / Griffey PSA's .

The prices that 1989 Upper Deck Griffey commands is absurd considering it probably has the highest print run of that whole set.

Yeah, I don't see a correlation between number of collectors and PSA subs. PSA subs may have hoarders loading up on a particular card.

If just one fourth of one percent of the US population collects cards, that's still 750,000 collectors. I imagine there are at least 2,000,000 people that collected cards at some point in their life in the US, and at least 500,000 that bought a pack of sport cards in the last year. Just swagging a guess though. There's no way Topps or any other card manufacturer would be in the business with only a few thousand collectors.

Good question and very thought provoking. I don't know where to begin with figuring the actual number . After I read the title of the thread I thought you were going down another path. Think of this: After you figure out how many "collectors" are out there take away the investors and then let me know how many collectors are out there. Or in another sense, what percentage of card enthusiast are collectors vs. investors ?

I am a collector of Auto cards

Sent from my SM-G920P using Freedom Card Board mobile app

BGS and PSA population reports skew very high on cards like this because of the amount of crack out and resubs