I was just asked by a family member, “how many serious Pokémon collectors are out there? I just took a shot in the dark and said in the thousands. I wanted to ask you guys, what do you think? How many?
I also told my relatives the majority of us are here on efour, or at least the best of us 
. I also showed them the forums and they showed a lot of interest!
Depends on how you define “serious”.
If I had to guess, I’d say probably more than 1000 and less than 100,000.
@smpratte might be able to define a lower bound by giving us how many unique views per month the forum gets.
I guess I would define a serious collector, as someone who is so involved in the hobby, it is a way of life for them. Someone who is constantly involved. It could range from someone who spends $100 or less a year on cards, or someone who spends over $100,000 a year on cards. As long as it’s someone truly involved and takes the hobby seriously, I would consider them a serious collector.
Anyone who enjoys collecting is a serious collector 
Here is the exact analytics page for this month:
Views are delineated between page views and forum requests. On average per day we have around 1,000ish guests plus about 300 registered members, which are all unique ip’s.
E4 is the most concentrated in relation to knowledge, experience and collection value, which would naturally have the most concentrated amount of serious collectors. For the hobby in general, I would say easily 10,000+ serious collectors; meaning people who significantly value pokemon as a part of their life. Overall I believe the market is much larger than most assume, this is true even for myself.
Thanks Scott!
Scott is right. I’m shocked at how many times I get contacted by collectors for stuff or advice that have great collections but I don’t know them at all. Or, a family member/collector passed and they seek advice. I’ve noticed many of them are non english speakers so they collect more privately.
I’ve wondered this same thing to myself.
I was also wondering the other day about how many people hit each order of magnitude of collection value.
$1,000?
$10,000?
$100,000?
$1,000,000?
I’d think surely nobody has enough to be worth $10,000,000 as I couldn’t even imagine what it would take but I’m sure there are clearly a few $1,000,000+ on this forum fairly likely.
I wonder what even would be the “market cap” so to speak of all Pokemon collectibles combined. Just 4/102 base 1st zard in PSA 10 is about $4.7M if you extended out @cullers recent $40k sale to the entire 118 pop though we know they all couldn’t sell for that tomorrow it demonstrates that base 1st graded charizard cards alone are in the $1-10M order of magnitude by themselves.
And you since pokemon is still incredibly popular with a young base NOW, it means the collectible market will continue to grow as more young people come of age to start buying cards with value, so the hobby is currently “HEALTHY”.
I just recorded a video that touches on this topic a bit. It will go out next week. It includes @cullers sales and a couple other private deals.
In short there are collectors with 10m in assets. There always have been, but now there are more collectors in all echelons.
@gemmintpokemon did a solid job talking about the market cap in the recent Beckett interview. For total collection value, it is always a wide range, as some cards rarely appear and sell well beyond their previous sale. Either way, there are multiple private high end collectors who aren’t active on any outlet.
@smpratte just finding time now to sit down and catch up on some of your youtube including the recent Q&A. Thanks for reminding me I need to listen to that gemmint podcast as well.
How many would you guess cross the $10M threshold? Surely I could say then with confidence none would cross the $100M threshold then? I mean I know several would be $1M+ easily including a few here on the forum but the confidence with which you are talking about there being $10M+ collectors surprised me a bit. I figured there may be some out there, but I’m not aware of anyone on this forum at that range. I guess I could be off but that is just a nearly unfathomable amount of cards. Being that the premier cards in the hobby are “only” $10k-$100k you are literally talking about 100-1,000 of the highest of the high end cards to hit that 7th zero.
Trying to define serious collectors is something I’ve struggled with quite a bit. It was my question to @smpratte and @garyis2000 but I don’t know if I got it in in time to be answered! (haven’t had the time to go through the whole video yet)
As evidenced by this thread I feel like the discussion inevitably turns to collection value whether or not we explicitly say that collection value is the marker of a serious collector. However I also feel like there is a clear delineation between collectors like us on E4 and people who just enjoy buying some cards and don’t go any deeper than that.
But we can’t use E4 readership as a count of serious collectors. As Gary said many collectors don’t speak English as a primary language or even if they do understand it don’t feel comfortable engaging in discussion.
The best definition of serious collector that I have been able to come up with is this: serious collectors have specific and clear collection goals which can be measured and completed, and also seek to build an expansive knowledge base of the Pokemon hobby. For example, one’s goal could be to collect all base set holos in PSA 10. Or even all base set holos regardless of grade. Or all Pikachu, Seviper, etc. cards. However “buy every GX card under $5 on eBay to have a big binder” doesn’t fit this definition. Neither does buying every card one thinks looks cool and hoping for the best.
I also think seeking to increase one’s knowledge of Pokemon is essential to being a serious collector. This can take many forms but I feel like those who just buy cards on eBay without going deeper into the hobby aren’t on the level of others. Knowledge is the most important thing you can have in this hobby and if you don’t seek to expand what you know I don’t think you can call yourself a serious collector.
Actually we did get to your question;)
Just posting to sub to such a quality thread
I like that Zack @gemmintpokemon mentioned market cap in the podcast. I hadn’t gotten that far yet as of my earlier post. Being someone fairly active in reading about investing and financial stuff (although not being deep into it $$ wise) it was exciting to hear about and I think I’ve heard it mentioned here on the forum a few other times. It is a very interesting and demonstrative thing to think about as far as the market cap goes. It really brings things into perspective when you are talking about huge portions of the hobby in the grand scheme of things being worth really paltry amounts in some respects. I mean a few big time multi millionaires getting into it could really send things sky high.
@fourthstartcg they hit your question at ~67:30 and I think @smpratte hit it well. It is all about mentality. My 6 year old niece was over the other day. We were filling in spots in her pikachu binder I have been helping her build. I’ve bought multiple 5 figure collections in the past year and her whole collection isn’t “worth” 3 figures but as far as pikachu collecting goes she is a much more serious collector than myself. I have single pikachus worth well more than her binder but when it comes to Pikachu specifically she is so much more invested and serious about it than myself and I couldn’t love the bond we share more due to that fact. It is awesome how this hobby can be enjoyed at the 6-7 figure level as well as the 2-3 figure level just as much by anyone.
edit to add:
I had a huge stack of raw pikachus from my latest 5 figure collection buy and it was amazing to go through her ~80-100 card binder of pikachu and for me to show a random D&P or platinum or HGSS era pikachu and she knew whether or not she had it in her binder 90+% of the time and I couldn’t recall it myself.
That is absolutely mind-boggling! Makes me happy to see, and it gives me a warm feeling inside that there are so many of us out there enjoying collecting Pokémon. Thanks for sharing!
Serious collectors stand between 175-192cm and tend to enjoy pistachio ice-cream. The migration patterns of a serious collector are one of the most tumultuous in the animal kingdom, they fly south from the Ukraine to Syria for the winter.
It is typical for a prime specimen of the serious collectors to mate 5-8 times per year.
These larger creatures have no natural predator but are known to have parasitic relationships with the sub-species known as the “facebook raffler”. Quite often the serious collector will prey on the “normie”, devouring their eggs whilst the normie forages for food.
The normie’s diet of XY evolutions, PSA 9 unlimited early wotc cards and consumption of the low-hanging fruit left behind by facebook rafflers leads to malnutrition and weak bones. Often the serious collector cannot sustain itself on normie and must move on to larger prey for sustenance.
Link to gemmints podcast?
Here’s the link to the link 
I think regardless of your spending “cap”, it is about the enjoyment and being involved like other’s mentioned. It is even better when those around you enjoy it. It is extremely hard to get a definitive number. It actually excites me to see a lot more private collector’s and I am sure their are plenty!!