Perhaps I can jump in with some evidence on this. Iâve ran E4 Secret Santa for the last several years, the previous years have seen anywhere from 80 to 110 participants each year. You would think that after running a Secret Santa on an internet forum for 11 years straight, you would have quite a lot of overlap problems where people end up sending to/receiving from the same person they did in previous years, which does take a bit of fun out of the gift.
However, Iâd say approximately 70% of SS participants each year are new and either joined in the previous year or recently became active. There are always the repeat longtime members, but they are a minority. With 70% new SS participants, itâs also likely that a majority of people will drop out of SS after participating for 1-2 years. The feedback I get from members on SS is overwhelmingly positive, so my impression is that the turnover is the result of people leaving the forum/hobby rather than not enjoying the event.
Itâs not scientific, but I agree that most people are in the hobby for 12-24 months and then cycle out.
Wouldnât participation in SS be more a proxy or gauge for âhigher/highly engagedâ forum members.
There may be folks that choose not to participate in SS or even simply outright lurking on E4 (not registered) but may very much still be âinâ the hobby (or at least not totally out of it).
It could inherently be true that things do run on 1-2year cycles and if anything, E4 being a collector-focused forum would be able to provide that good first sensing, but just wanted to point this out
This is a great pointââI think itâs further evidence for the idea that people do cycle in and out relatively quickly though. If even the highly engaged collectors who are involved enough to join E4, post comments, buy a $50+ gift and send it to a random person on the internet are in and out within a year or two, less engaged collectors are probably in and out even faster.
Itâs also worth pondering whether or not weâre including people that cycle in and out repeatedly.
I have three primary hobbies, (not going to include health related ones such as working out or cardio) those being collecting Pokemon cards, collecting/playing video games, and creating art.
I find myself consistently cycling through them, i.e. Iâll spend a year collecting cards like a madman, burn out, then rotate over to a video game year, burn out, spend my next year drawing and animating, and so on, so forth⊠I donât think that means Iâve âleftâ the hobby, Iâm just prioritizing others. Been doing this for as long as I can remember.
Now if weâre discussing your average enthusiast that goes a little hogwild for a couple of sets during a nostalgia fueled haze, yeah, theyâre more of an in and out affair.
Guess if youâve got data far back enough and enough samples (plus got the time), could do something like a customer lifespan estimation (assuming accounted for things like return rates) hah
Iâd imagine people who collected as kids and are getting back into it as adults (a large portion if not a majority of adult pokemon card collectors) probably stay in longer than that.
I feel like as much time as we have to prep, the drop off is probably more from people just being busy around that time and not wanting to over commit since it means a lot for the recipient.
Iâve hesitated before signing up for this reason but have always found the process rewarding
I still need 3 big ones to complete my set. Dark Charizard, Dragonite and Raichu, considering the last Raichu sale in the UK went 140 USD over market price deflated me. Pointless importing from the US at market as get hit with the taxes which ainât that bad but the duty fees with cards over 170 ish USD
