Postcrossing Blog

I remember writing my first postcard: I was seven, spending the summer vacations of first grade by the sea with my family. That year, my dad decided to delegate the holiday postcard writing to me, since I had just learned how to write and had “such a nice handwriting”. Honoured, I took the task very seriously, drafting a short text to tell my grandparents about all the sandcastles my brother and I had built, how many ice-creams we had eaten… and how much we missed them. I did my best calligraphy and was very mindful of the small space as my dad dictated each line of the address. The sense of pride as I arrived weeks later in my grandma’s home to see the postcard proudly displayed on the fireplace mantle was huge. 😊

So I wondered… is this a common experience? On average, how old are people when they write their first postcard ever? To find out, we decided to do a poll! Over 13000 of you responded, and here are the results:

Like me, the majority of postcrossers seems to have had their first postcard-sending experience earlier on, when they were 10 or younger, with progressively less people in each of the following age groups. That seems logical, as postcards are quite a neat way of practicing writing for the little ones and to get them excited about mail.

But we all know that some countries have more of a mail culture than others, so we were curious to discover how these statistics differed around the world. Let’s have a closer look at the countries with more than 50 votes (for more reliable results):

Interesting! Seems like there’s a clear start 'em young trend in Europe, where the majority of people write their first postcard in their primary school years. Finland takes the cake, with 77% of members writing their first postcard before their 11th birthday — which isn’t very surprising, given the fact that they were always the country with more postcrossers per capita! Switzerland, Netherlands and Germany are close behind, all with more than 70% of postcrossers also sending their first postcards early on.

Shifting to Asia, Japan’s numbers seem to be similar as those in Europe, but they are the outliers of the region. People in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and India share the experience of writing the first postcard in their teenage years… and on the other end of the spectrum, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand are the latest starters of the group, with the majority of people writing their first postcard when they’re already adults.

So… what do you think? Were these results in line with what you expected for your country? And if you remember writing your first postcard ever, who was it addressed to? 🙂

PS: We’re always looking for new ideas for polls! If you thought of something cool to ask postcrossers (and that would fit in a poll), let us know in the comments below.

Some years ago on Postcrossing’s fourth anniversary, we asked members to send us photos of themselves mailing their postcards, and compiled the results on an emotional video that still has me reaching for the tissues every time I see it.

At the time, we noticed something interesting: our simple request for “a photo of you mailing your postcards” produced a variety of different results. Most were photos with all shapes and colours of street mailboxes, but there were also lots of photos taken inside or just outside post offices, and some even featuring home mailboxes… At the time, we hadn’t even realised that in some places, mail carriers doing their rounds also picked up outgoing letters and postcards from people’s home mailboxes, if they found something there!

Since then, we’ve wondered… how are postcards usually mailed around the world? We’ve certainly noticed that street mailboxes or post offices are harder to find in some countries than others, but being geeks, we wanted to see the data. Over 10,000 of you responded to this question last week, so here are the results:

Overall, things look more or less divided: while the majority seems to be mailing their postcards from a post office (either at the counter or at the mailbox there), an equally large percentage of postcrossers send their mail from street mailboxes. What happens if we look deeper into the data though, country by country?

Here is the detailed graph, showing only countries with more than 50 votes (for more reliable results):

The results were a lot less predictable than we expected! A few countries stand out:

• In Turkey, Brazil and Slovakia the majority of mail is posted from the post office counter. Are mailboxes hard to find? Or do people perhaps not trust that they’re emptied regularly? 🤔
• The country who loves post offices the most seems to be Indonesia though — 97% of postcards are usually sent from there!
• On the other side of the spectrum, 90% of mail from the Netherlands is posted from street mailboxes. We assume this has to do with the replacement of so many post offices with “service points” inside other shops.
• And the USA seems to be one of the few countries where mail is regularly picked up by mail carriers. It sounds quite convenient, and we wonder why other countries don’t seem to have caught on to this practice…

We’d love to hear from you all on these statistics. Were the results in line with what you expected from your experience in your own country? Why, or why not?

Also, some people responded the poll with “Other”, which we always include to cover all the options we didn’t think about. We find it intriguing though… if you voted “Other”, what does that mean in your country?

Thirteen months ago, we published a ranking of how popular Postcrossing was in a given country, based on the number of postcrossers for every 100,000 inhabitants.

It’s been a while since then, so we thought it was time to compile some fresh statistics, and check if there were any noticeable differences. Here is the updated ranking:

What do you know? Finland is still leading the ranking by a mile! :) New-comers to the table include the Åland Islands, Guam, South Korea and Israel. Please note that in the case of the Åland Islands, the ranking is skewed, as their population is about 26,000 inhabitants.

On the fast-climbers side, Hong Kong jumped 10 places (from 19th to 9th) but the most surprising climb comes from Ukraine, which rose from 35th place to 16th! Well done!

Are there other statistics you would be curious to see here? Let us know!

PS: Like the last time, to calculate the data above we took into account only countries with more than 10 members and excluded countries which were too small or of which we did not have any relevant population data.

Some time ago, Pebbles84 sent us this suggestion for a blog post:

“How about an overview of how country distribution has changed over the years? I’m a member for over 2 years, and it seems things have changed quite a lot. It would be nice to see in which countries Postcrossing has grown a lot, and how the amount of members has changed.”

If you’ve been a member for a long time, you probably have noticed that Postcrossing’s popularity in certain countries changes over time. Sometimes, a news report or a blurb on a popular website will catapult the project to stardom, raising the number of signups in that city or country.

Members that have been here since the beginning might remember a time when every other card seemed to be traveling to Portugal, Brazil or Finland, or how rare Asian countries once were. These days, there are definitely more users from Russia or Taiwan on the site – countries come and go in waves.

Being data geeks, we were curious to see what the member distribution looked like plotted in a graph, and so we crunched some numbers and did the math.

You can explore the results on the interactive chart below:

Isn’t it interesting? You can see when Postcrossing started to become popular in some countries, or how others have lost their prominent rank. Also, the “Other” category is growing, meaning that the pool of countries is becoming increasingly diverse.

Keep in mind however, that the countries that have the most users are not always the ones that send more postcards! If you’re curious, you can check out the current number of members per country and postcards sent per country on our Explore Countries page!

You can probably guess which countries have more members in Postcrossing just by looking at where you send or receive to/from, right? And we even have some statistics to show that too.

But, obviously not all countries have the same population! If we would take a sample of the same dimension in each country, which ones would contain more Postcrossers in it? Or in other words, in which ones is Postcrossing more popular?

We decided to do the math and share the results with you. We took into account the approximate population of each country, the number of users and came up with an interesting list.

And here’s how the ranking of the top 50 look like:

Surprise, surprise – Finland is at the very top. I bet you all guessed that one. But did you guessed all the following ones? Indeed, we had some surprises as well. Tiny Estonia with 1,3 million people manages to have plenty of Postcrossers. Same goes for Lithuania and even more with Macau!

Are there other statistics you would be curious to see here? Let us know!

PS: To calculate the data above we took into account only countries with more than 10 users and excluded countries which were too small or of which we did not have any relevant population data.