Okay, maybe complain isn’t the right word, but there’s one thing that I’ve noticed in poking around there, the overwhelming majority of videos made about stamp collecting over on YouTube, they all tend to be aimed at, shall we say, the beginners?

So let’s talk about that, please.

First, I want to be very clear that I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. Attracting new people to the hobby is always a positive, but that can’t be all anyone wants to do. My real issue isn’t that it’s going on, it’s that it seems to be all that’s going on.

If you go out to the forums, for instance, you can find forums that seem to be aimed at the more experienced collector. There, you can sit around for hours and discuss die varieties and paper types and every perforation variant under the sun. I love doing that. Sometimes it gets into some pretty obscure minutia, but it’s still fun. They don’t restrict the less experienced collector at all, they try to help them along, but it’s not like “this is a stamp and these are called perforations!” Likewise, there are forums out there that are geared more toward the amateur collector and that’s fine. Different strokes for different folks. I’m on one of those and I try to help the less experienced as much as I can since I’ve been doing this for more than 40 years, on and off.

That said though, when it comes to YouTube in particular, there seems to be very little of “substance” that might interest a, shall we say, more advanced collector. The overwhelming majority of content there is “hey, I got a bunch of kiloware, let’s go through it!” or “here are the really expensive stamps that you’ll never have!” There seem to be an awful lot of scams too.

And like I said, that’s fine for what it is, except for the scams. On rare occasion, I will get some kiloware myself, as you saw in a recent post, even though the overwhelming majority of stamps are things I don’t care about one bit and I just give most of them away, but just sifting through them can be fun. Yet that seems to be the limit of what YouTube has to offer and, as I suppose is no surprise, none of these channels have many subscribers because their focus is very, very narrow.

My question is why? It would seem to me that YouTube would be a perfect place for virtual stamp exhibitions and talks to be posted. Go to your local stamp club, film the presentation (with permission of course) and upload it to YouTube for all the world to see. People can get on there and talk about their passions. People are out there creating exhibits for bourses all the time, even when there are no shows going on. Why not show them off? Don’t get me wrong, there is a tiny little bit of that but certainly not enough. The overwhelming majority is “so you found some stamps…”

I think this is important because, eventually, anyone who takes up collecting stamps is going to outgrow everything that YouTube has to offer. Now maybe they won’t need YouTube anymore, I don’t know, but it certainly has the potential to be entertaining and it’s a lot better, at least IMO, to be able to see the stamps rather than just talk about them in a forum. You’ve got a collection of U.S. first issue revenues? Great, let’s see them! In fact, I went looking for something like that there once and there just isn’t anything there, at least nothing in depth.

The other problem that I have is that the production quality of most of the stamp-related content is, shall we say, poor. There’s only one channel that has done a lot of good work, at least that I’ve seen, and that’s Exploring Stamps. How the heck that guy can travel as extensively as he does, I have no clue, but his videos are well put together and entertaining, even if aimed at a beginning audience. I might like some of the people out there who are making content, but let’s be honest, it’s the same kind of thing, quality-wise, that we saw back in the early days of YouTube.

This is really just a rant, mostly because, once you get people involved, you have to keep them interested and I think there’s a lot of potential that’s being wasted on YouTube. I briefly kicked around the idea of trying something myself but I just don’t have the time. It is time consuming, trust me I know, but a lot of the advanced collectors, they’re retired and probably have plenty of time already. It just seems really odd to me. It’s why I brought it up.