Over the past 3 years, I have really looked forward writing a blog post on December 31st highlighting the accomplishments of the SportsCollectors.Net community. The numbers always seem to do a pretty good job of telling some of the story:

	12/31/10	12/31/09	12/31/08	12/31/07
Successes	673,677	578,826	483,735	378,537
Requests	922,224	798,034	670,300	527,214
Autographed Trade Items	61,976	47,236	29,167	17,841
Message Board Posts	398,082	284,566	201,851	132,334
Photos	91,578	54,439	21,581	N/A
Private Signings	269	N/A	N/A	N/A
Members	28,323	25,683	22,285	19,062
Premium Members	5,579	4,866	4,161	3,503

You all must really love what we have going, as there is impressive growth once again across the board - and it's amazing the contributions of this community.

Last year we made a pretty major commitment to upgrading the servers that power SCN and this year we took big time advantage of the bigger capacity. There were two big new functionalities we rolled out in 2010:

1. I have been a pretty devoted autographed set collector for years, and it was really painful trying to keep track of who I needed and thier signing habits. SportsCollectors.Net came up with a solution to his very common challenge for collectors by cross referencing Player Signing habits with sports cards in sets from SportsCardDatabase.com. In June, we launched the Card Sets and Wantlists.
   
   
2. Private signings have exploded in popularity on the site, with many members offering to get some tough signers at reasonable prices. The problem was that it was difficult to follow all the signings being offered on our message board, so we launched the Private Signings section this month. So far so good, as we already have had 269 approved signings listed in the new section.

In 2011, I have plans for more great stuff on the way. As always appreciate your ideas for functionality on the site.

In August I spent 3 days at the National Sports Collectors Convention in Baltimore, MD. It was really a fun time and I enjoyed getting to meet many of our members.

My Collection in 2010

I started off the year writing more players in January and February, but totally slowed down after. I sent out 156 request and received 119 successes for a 76% success rate. The highlights were when my buddy sweetal found working addresses for both Pearl Washington and Shelton Jones for my 1989 Hoops set - I am now 6 cards away from finishing it (Michael Jordan, Patrick Ewing AS, John Stockton AS, Sylvester Gray, Allen Leavell, and John "Hot Plate" Williams).

Other somewhat surprising successes this year were from Gary Payton, Reggie Miller, and Sterling Sharpe. All three are future HOFers in my eyes and I would have never thought any of them would be signing by mail at the beginning of the year.

Many of our members share a fun project I am working on, collecting signed rookie cards of Hall of Famers. This year I made some nice progess in this area, going from 67 to 142 in my signed Hall of Fame Rookie Cards albulm posted in the photos section. Of the 75 I added in 2010 - 5 were from SCN private signings, the Jerry Rice was in trade, about 2/3 of the others were from getting guys to sign via mail (some with donations), and the rest were from buying on eBay or at the National.

Closing out 2010 and Looking to 2011

I just wanted to thank everyone again for all your support. You folks (our members) and your passion for this hobby are what makes SCN. You all inspire me to enjoy the hobby more every year, and I am happy to have gotten to know many of you. I want you all to have a happy, prosperous, and safe New Year.

I really want to find time to write more blog posts about collecting and updates on the things we are working on. I was very about on this front in 2010 as this was only my 7th post, so I'd like it to be much more frequent.

There's some really big things on the way for both SCN and SportsCardDatabase for 2011 and beyond.

PRINT  |  PERMALINK        

Recent Topics

Month List