Back in the beginning of 2018, I wrote a post about the site’s statistics in 2017. I meant to do one of those posts every year… but seem to have forgotten about it last year. Sorry, everyone! So, without further ado, here are some of the Postcrossing statistics for the year of 2019.
5,100,682 postcards received
For a few years now, we seem to have stabilized at around 5 million postcards exchanged per year, which is pretty neat and puts us on track to celebrating 60 million postcards in late 2020. Who’s looking forward to that party? 🎉
25.44 days (average) and 16.94 days (median) travel time
Do you still remember the difference between an average (or mean) and a median? To calculate the average of a set of values, you sum all the values in your set and divide them by the total number of items in that set. This is great if your values are more or less well distributed, but outliers (both large and small) tend to disproportionately distort the end result.
Enter the median, which can be roughly described as the “middle” value of a data set. If you put all the travel times in a looong ordered line, 17 days would be the value in the centre of this distribution. This is a more reliable value to determine how many days most postcards travel before reaching their destination. Some will be quicker, some will be slower, but on the whole, postcards seem to travel somewhere around 17 days. This number hasn’t changed much over the years.
26,836,704,573 kms (or 16,675,555,116 miles) of total traveled distance
That’s enough to go to Neptune and back 3 times! That number is so gigantic, it sure makes me happy that postage is no longer calculated according to the distance traveled…
19,993 km (or 12,423 miles) was the longest distance traveled by a postcard
That’s CN-2803565, exchanged between jessicastier in Xian, Shaanxi and LalyVillablanca in… Wait, can you try to guess which country that postcard traveled to, without looking? Which country is most likely to be the antipodes of a city in central China? 🤔 To check whether you’ve guessed correctly, have a look at the postcard’s page.
964,324 postcards were sent from Germany 🇩🇪
No surprise here, Germany continues to be the most active country in Postcrossing with over 964K postcards sent from there. Here are the other countries and territories in the top 20:
| Ranking | Country | Postcards sent |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 🇩🇪 Germany | 964,324 |
| 2 | 🇺🇸 U.S.A. | 631,917 |
| 3 | 🇷🇺 Russia | 600,844 |
| 4 | 🇳🇱 Netherlands | 243,805 |
| 5 | 🇫🇮 Finland | 219,883 |
| 6 | 🇨🇳 China | 206,578 |
| 7 | 🇹🇼 Taiwan | 184,779 |
| 8 | 🇧🇾 Belarus | 141,269 |
| 9 | 🇯🇵 Japan | 135,628 |
| 10 | 🇨🇿 Czechia | 135,115 |
| 11 | 🇫🇷 France | 115,193 |
| 12 | 🇬🇧 United Kingdom | 113,527 |
| 13 | 🇵🇱 Poland | 89,051 |
| 14 | 🇨🇦 Canada | 84,649 |
| 15 | 🇭🇰 Hong Kong | 55,600 |
| 16 | 🇧🇪 Belgium | 54,741 |
| 17 | 🇱🇹 Lithuania | 48,795 |
| 18 | 🇦🇹 Austria | 47,863 |
| 19 | 🇦🇺 Australia | 47,293 |
| 20 | 🇨🇭 Switzerland | 45,741 |
Sidolix sent the most postcards
That was close though! Once more, well done to our fleißig German members. To be fair, it’s easy to be an enthusiastic postcrosser in Germany, where postage is still reasonable and postcard shops are plentiful in most places.
| Ranking | Postcrosser | Country | Sent |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Sidolix | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,512 |
| 2 | uttia4a | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,511 |
| 3 | hepman | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,407 |
| 4 | ned44440 | 🇮🇪 Ireland | 2,398 |
| 5 | Antje321 | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,374 |
| 6 | Matin | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,365 |
| 7 | tullipan | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,365 |
| 8 | Willi | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,316 |
| 9 | Silke45 | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,312 |
| 10 | rosenbusch | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,310 |
| 11 | Kekel | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,264 |
| 12 | DJHK | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,230 |
| 13 | Rehus | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,207 |
| 14 | Emillio | 🇨🇿 Czechia | 2,205 |
| 15 | Bock | 🇦🇹 Austria | 2,194 |
| 16 | elbe | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,192 |
| 17 | bas31 | 🇨🇿 Czechia | 2,182 |
| 18 | TimSarah | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,171 |
| 19 | ho-modellfan | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,169 |
| 20 | Rosenquarz | 🇩🇪 Germany | 2,150 |
710 meetups organized in 54 different countries
Soooo many of you organized meetings to celebrate Postcrossing with other members of the community in 2019 — from Italy to Oman, Singapore to Iran, Seychelles or Isle of Man, postcrossers got together in all continents except Antarctica. Hurray!
And that’s it for last year! If you’re hungry for more numbers, Postcrossing has a group of pages dedicated to statistics where you can find more data to explore.
61 comments so far
Wow, what great statistics 👍👏 and I even get a mention 😊.
Keep up the good work on this site. I love it ❤.
Well done to us all and especially to the hardworking Postcrossing Team!!
Love this, fascinating info. And I guessed correctly which country the postcard from China went to, yay!
Fascinating, thanks! Has there ever been a postcard that's travelled 20,000 km or more?
I love these Statistics... :)
I was wondering, is there a statistic on total lost Cards? So cards that don´t arrive within the 365Day-frame?
fascinating info - thanks for providing a little insight into what we all do. Love postcrossing and appreciate all the work put into to it to keep it moving along smoothly!
Круто!!! Немцы прекрасны)
Wow! 👍
Wow! Love Postcrossing😁
I really enjoy these statistics every year. Thank you for sharing them. Great work Postcrossers!
I love this & love Postcrossing!!
This is fantastic!!! 😃
Very interesting!
All of the 20 "most-senders" wrote more postcards in one year, than I did in 6 years. :-) That's enthusiasm I guess.
Yo hace poco que estoy en postcrossing, desde junion 2019 y mo escribo mas postales porque no puedo, solo puedo tener en circulacion 11 hasta llegar a 100 que tendre una mas.....
Thank you for these very interesting statistics!
I second the request for information on lost postcards (it would also be interesting to see which origin and destination countries have the highest numbers of lost cards, as I guess most mail gets lost there instead of te travel between countries).
If possible statistics for 2018 would be great as well!
A postcard from Germany to the world costs € 0.90, from Spain € 1.55. Now you see why there is no Spanish Postcrossers on the list ....
:( :( :(
What gracious time you give to figure these astounding numbers to share with the wonderful community! Myself and my son Gen24 reached our 1 year Anniversary this very week. My daugher MerakiArtist follows soon with her anniversary! We are thankful for the connection and joy PC brings! Best wishes for many more years! Jessica
Thanks for stats. it is interesting!
@fiddlesticks Interesting question — Paulo had a look and it turns out, this is the longest traveled postcard on Postcrossing ever! Antipodes are hard to come by. :)
Postcrossing is great. I love it very much. 😍
Germany is on the top rank. This made me smile but depending of the population should not be Finland on the top rank? 😊
What does the stat say? 🤔
@giseberg This is not a per capita ranking — it's just the total number of sent postcards per country. Indeed, if we were talking about per capita, Finland is usually in the top spot. You can see the last time we compiled those statistics here: https://www.postcrossing.com/blog/2018/06/26/postcrossers-per-capita-an-updated-ranking
Wow, interesting stats! 🙂 My suggestion for the next spotlight interview, pick one of the top senders and ask how they do (and afford) that, send thousands of postcards in a year. 😅
Any "most improved" country in terms of sending or receiving postcards, from the previous year's perfoemance?
Fabulous display! Thanks for much for compiling all that data. Much appreciated! I love postcrossing!
Thank you for these! Inspiring numbers!
Even if I don't see my country, Italy, in the ranking of the top 20, for me Postcrossing really is amazing, like all its members!
Greetings to everyone :-)
Wow, nearly every 5th card was send from Germany...
But I have to admit, even though the fees were raised last summer: it is still affordable to send cards from Germany.
I went to Norway for some days, buying happily lots of nice cards (I kept some slots for travel mode...). Watching me buy all these cards, my Norwegian friend just said: you are not going to send them all! We can have a nice lunch in a restaurant instead....
We had a nice lunch....and I ended up sending just four cards.
I am used to higher fees in Italy and Spain, but this was really like a shock, realizing not only how much time and effort is put into each single card, but how much money is involved as well.
Thanks a lot to everyone!
"Postcrossing without accounting is impossible")) Statistics turn out to be very interesting.
Now I totally understand why I receive so many postcards
from Germany and Russia.
Having just joined Postcrossing this past August, seeing this year-end statistics were so cool! Thank you so much for sharing!
This is awesome!
Great work!
Loved to read it.
Great and interesting information, thank you.
I would also love to see the list of the members who sent the most postcards while on travel mode. Since travel mode was introduced at the end of year 2017, there is now a better chance to receive postcards from the "rare" countries. We should applaud the users who contributed the most.
@Misiasio21 I also really would like to know. Whenever I am on travel I too try to send postcards. :-)
Thank you for all the statistical work :-) Amazing numbers.
Adoro estas informações :)
Obrigado muito curioso :)
Parabéns pelo trabalho :)
very sad that Ukraine was in top-10 when I started PXing but now even not in top-20(((( Our postbills rised awfully((( So many of my friends stopped sending postcards beacuse they cannot afford it anymore
These figures show how people around the world are intense and crazy by PC.
Some manage to send incredible amount of postcards. Wow.
Glad to be part of this 'insanity'!
Thanks to the PC Team, amazing numbers. Love PC ciao to all of you!
I am so proud of my country Czechia and two postcrossers who ranked in the top ten! Happy postcrossing to all! Irena, CZpostcards
What happened in Russia???
Russian postcrossers used to write about 1 million postcards a year, too. Now it's not even 2/3 of that!?
I am happy that Postcrossing is doing such a fine job bringing the world together! I enjoy sending cards that make my hometown and my home state better known, and I like getting pictures of the world. Keep up the good work!
Very cool to see all these numbers! I wonder who had the most number of favorited postcards...? Or who sent the most travelling postcards..? Or who has donated the most number of times...?
I love the stats, and I love the comments. . .I think Paulo and Ana need to co-author a book (along with their team) about all the fun we are having. Given the number of Postcrossers, the book would be an instant best-seller.
How many Postcrossers work in Post Offices? (Any stats on the most frequently asked questions about Postcrossing) Keep the stats coming.
These numbers are amazing!
I didn't send many in 2019, but I made some good friends here, though.
The cost of sending in Latvia rose dramatically from the 1st of January. It was 0,64 (EU) or 0,71, now it is 1,54. Really I don't know how many cards I will send now...
Great work everyone! One postcard at the time, we will share the love!
Congrats for another great year! To me, Postcrossing show that the people ARE their countries, not the leaders! We have much more in common than you might think!
Thanks for the great stats !
Wow, I´m the nr 1 by sent cards ! Yupiiiiiiiiiiiiii !!!
I´m retired and I like to write , send and receive cards . Of cause, it´s not a cheap hobby . To reduce the cost, I let make cards by company from picture taken by myself so I pay just 30 € cent for 1 card.
I´m going every day to the post office and let all cards postmark !
I don´t put the cards in the mailbox.
THANKS to all Postcrossers who read the whole profil and try to send cards I like !
Wish you all the best for 2020 !
Really really like this website.It gives me a lot of joy.And thanks to the staff of the website.
Wow! Great numbers!! I enjoyed most the travel of the postcard from China to Chile in 60 days 😍😍
Hiep Hiep Hoera! I'm looking forward for the 60 million cards party.
-THANK YOU POSTCROSSING FROM THE BOTTOM OF MY HEART -
I was wondering the same thing as tanea_wolf about statistics on lost postcards. Although I've only been a member for about 9 months, already 5 cards haven't reached their destinations (within 60 days). That seems like a lot to me. Would be interesting to know if that's within the "normal" range.
Wow !!! I can't believe Lithuania is top 17th in countries most sent postcards ! :O
german national postcard postage has been raised 33% from (I admit it) low 45 cent to 60 cent.
The german post offices should stop with yearly postage rises and no, rising it higher and then saying "It'll stay that high for 5 years, but we'd have reached that postage if we'd rise it yearly anyway..." isn't the right thing to do.
More Statistic: a new high score in Cards For Literacy Donation (so far): 8,977.90 €
We beat all years before. :-)
i heart postcrossing! just sad u.s. Didn't make top 20 postcrossers!!!
Always interesting, stats! 5 million +, wow! Just amazing work, team! Not just for giving the world this crazy beautiful service, but for assiduously tracking, sharing, and encouraging. I'm a relatively new Postcrosser and am really, really excited to be one.
Great statistics
Proud to be a part of postcrossing family
Thanks to all the postcrossers
Best wishes
What an amazing experience !
Love the statistics!
I wonder, if the distance that card CN-2803565 travelled, was measured in the other direction, crossing the Pacific, would it be the same? Maybe it would, 19.9993 kms, that's half way around the earth! :D
Another interesting statistic would be the number of members who have reached the maximum number of cards (100) in transit and the average amount of time it took to reach that milestone.
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