Postcrossing Blog

We have a soft spot for statistics and we know many of you do as well, so here comes the yearly post with some juicy stats about Postcrossing. These were compiled by Paulo, with data from the whole 2020. Shall we have a look?

4,513,545 postcards received

That’s about half a million postcards fewer than the previous year, which is understandable considering the year we’ve just had. In fact, looking at the graph of postcards sent per month last year, you can clearly see the “pandemic dip” in April.

Things have slowly gotten better since then though, and we saw a lot of new members on the site in the following months, as people settled into their new routines and started to explore new hobbies they could do from home.

28.27 days (average) and 17.67 days (median) travel time

No surprise that things were a bit slower last year! With thousands of flights cancelled and postal services scrambling to find alternative routes to send mail abroad, postcards spent more days on the road. Some even crossed continents in ships or trains!

These numbers are calculated for the whole year though… How do the numbers look like on a weekly basis?

Things got a little delayed mid-2020, with postcards taking a few days longer to arrive on average, but the situation seems to have somewhat recovered in the meantime.

21,954,937,005 kms or (13,642,165,382 miles) of total traveled distance

Quite a bit less than last year, but to be expected with less postcards traveling, closed borders and cancelled flights. Many postal services have restricted their deliveries to nearby countries, where connections were easier to ensure and so, on average, postcards traveled to closer destinations last year. 26% of all postal routes remain closed at the moment, but things have slowly been improving with more and more connections being re-opened every week.

Here’s how far postcards traveled, per week:

The average travel distance was 4,864.23 kms (or 3,022.49 miles) per postcard — around 7.5% less distance than in 2019.

19,974 kms or (12,411 miles) was the longest distance traveled by a postcard

Postcard ES-622789 traveled between the town of Espasante in northern Spain and Christchurch in New Zealand — just a few kilometers short of its true antipodal point!

1,004,831 postcards sent from Germany

Postcrossers in Germany broke their 2019 record and sent even more postcards in 2020, reaching the 1 million postcards/year threshold! This enthusiasm also led them to add one more digit to their postcard IDs — postcard DE-10000000 was registered just yesterday. 🎉

Here are the countries in the top 20:

Same countries as last year in that list, with some shuffling around. Germany, USA, Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK managed to increase their total of sent postcards, but the remaining countries all sent less cards throughout last year.

DJHK sent the most postcards (registered in 2020)

Jürgen (aka DJHK) sent 2485, 103 more than the second most active postcrosser reinholdo (2382). Willi (2360), Antje321 (2322) and Sidolix (2310) complete the top 5.

Åland Islands sent the most postcards per capita

We thought it would be cool to do a different kind of ranking with 2020's data, to give less populous countries and territories a chance to be featured. Here are postcards sent per 1000 inhabitants, for countries with more than 10 members:

It’s interesting to see smaller countries and islands thrown into the mix! Here’s a previous similar ranking we did some years ago.

October 1, 2020 was the day in which more postcards were sent

No surprises there — World Postcard Day was a huge hit, with a little more than 40,000 postcards received which were sent on that day. The following 3 best days of the year all happened in February, with around 16,000 postcards being sent.

And that’s it for last year’s statistics! I know you’re all eager to read about the census results as well, but it’ll still take us some time to parse those 30,000 or so replies… 😅 We’ll post about it here on the blog once we have some insights to share!

A few years ago, we accidentally heard about a pub in Bournemouth in the UK auspiciously called “60 Million Postcards” and thought “Wouldn’t that be a great place to throw a party when Postcrossing reaches 60 million postcards?!” And then… you know… The pandemic came and everything changed, naturally. We’re a little sad we can’t fulfill this silly plan, but not all is lost — we can still have our traditional milestone guessing game!

If you weren’t around for one of these before, the idea is simple:

Easy, right? Just place a bet for the minute you think lucky postcard number 60,000,000 will be registered according to your own predictions. Feel free to have a look through Postcrossing’s statistics page if that helps, or maybe crack a fortune cookie (or some eggs?) to come up with a good time slot — anything goes!

And naturally, there will be prizes! The postcrosser whose bet is the closest to the exact minute when postcard number 60 million is registered will win a box set of 100 postcards, and the 6 next best guesses (before or after the registering time) will receive a pack of 20–30 postcards each. 🎉 Hurray!

Some rules: each time slot can only be chosen by one single person, so the first person to pick that slot gets to keep it. You can change it at a later stage if you’d like, but only from the available time slots left. The bets will be automatically closed when there are 1000 postcards left to postcard 60,000,000. Check the contest page for more details.

So, give it your best shot… but be sure to do it soon as good slots are usually taken quickly. Keep sending postcards, and good luck everyone!

The writing prompts invite postcrossers to write about a different topic on their postcards’ messages every month. These are just suggestions though — if you already know what you want to write about, or the recipient gives you some pointers, that’s great too!

January is often a time for resolutions and figuring out what we want to focus on in the year ahead, so this month we decided to prompt you all to write about a skill you plan to learn!

I’m one of those people who really enjoy learning, so I’m fired up about this prompt! I’m studying pretty intensively at the moment, so my main commitment is learning to apply and interpret statistical tests… I know, I know, I’m yawning too about this idea! But it’s really important for complex biological systems, so I’m going to give it 100%.

I do enjoy doing crafts in my spare time, so I might try my hand at designing really small cross-stitch patterns! I’ve already done a few small ones, like the one pictured… but that one is 1.5 inches (less than 4 cm) in diameter, and I have a couple of even smaller frames that are just 1 inch (3 cm) wide. I’d love to design something tiny but recognisable, and make it into a necklace!

So now it’s your turns! What skills are you hoping to learn or improve on in the year ahead? We’d love to hear from you in the comments to this post, but you can also turn to this prompt if you’re stuck for what to write on a postcard!

Masha (aka MMokeeva) is a Russian postcrosser living near Moscow, passionate about books and literature. She stumbled on Postcrossing a few years ago, and has been hooked since then, even opening her own postcard shop, starting a podcast about postcards, and this year Masha even launched a book about Postcrossing, titled “Postcrossing — Book of Secret Knowledge”! It’s a beautiful book, featuring stories about the website, interviews with postcrossers and lots of other postcard-related knowledge and interesting facts. We’re happy to invite Masha to the blog today, to tell us all about how postcards took over her life. 😊

Where did your interest in postcards come from? Have you always been a person who liked mail?

“Once I got lost in Moscow. There was a heavy snowstorm. I went to the gift shop to ask where I should go. I was wearing a large bearskin coat that I had inherited from my ancestors. It made me a little clumsy, and I knocked down the postcard rack. The postcards lay like a carpet in front of me, bright and beautiful, with the image of the proud Red Square. And I fell in love with them!”

I would like to have such a fascinating story of happy meeting with postcards, but in fact my story is quite ordinary :) When I was a child, I wrote paper letters to other children. It never even occurred to me to send them postcards, because no one was doing it around me!.. When I got older, I used to buy postcards as fine pictures to put them on the table or use as a bookmark. I started sending postcards just when I found Postcrossing!

How did you come across Postcrossing? What got you hooked?

One day I was looking for a postcard for a gift to my granny and I saw the strange word “Postcrossing” on the website of that online postcard shop. The next day I ran to the post office with my first five cards! I just fell in love with every moment: when you pull out an address, read the profile, view the received and sent postcards… it was like rediscovering the world and the people around.

You even created your own shop selling stationery! How did Amelie Cards get started and how is it going?

I did start it about 5 months after I began to send postcards though Postcrossing. 😊 I was so impressed by this huge postcard world… and I was unemployed. I decided to try to open an online postcard store and printed postcards that I couldn’t find in Russia: with Russian writers, reprints of ads from the Russian Empire, funny “Keep Calm”. Then I started paying more attention to themes what other people need, and so the range expanded! Currently, the most popular sections are the “My Russia” series with atmospheric pictures by independent Russian photographers, illustrations by Russian contemporary artists and quotes from books and movies.

Where did the idea for a book about Postcrossing come from? What prompted you to write it?

When I became interested in postcards, I was curious: what stories hides behind them? Who creates postcards and why? How do postcards reflect our life? What research and collections exist? What is the situation with postcards in other countries? I couldn’t read about it in Russian anywhere, just some scraps of information. My first attempt to answer some questions was my podcast Открытки Амели in 2017. After 11 episodes, I realized that people are interested in learning more about postcards, but it would be more convenient for them to read about it rather than listen to it. So I wrote a plan for the book and started working on it in my spare time. I was writing a book that I wanted to read myself.

Could you give postcrossers an overview of the book? How would you describe this book to someone who hasn’t heard about it before?

This may sound strange, but this book is for people who want to know the postcard as a person: from all sides. Its character, talents and story of the life. It’s also the book about people who love mail. There are seven chapters: about Postcrossing Project, the text on a postcard, postage stamps, postcards, postal connection, postcrossers and postcard shops. There are also life hacks, dictionary of postcrosser words, and 100 ideas for a postcard message.

I have already received more than a hundred warm reviews that make me very happy. People write that they learned a lot of new things from the book, and that they had registered on postcrossing.com or came back to the Big Game after a long break after reading it!

What was your writing process with this book, and what parts are you especially proud of?

There was a lot of very diverse work! It was like making stained glass window from different fragments. And it was important to fit these fragments together and make up a beautiful and logical narrative. Besides, I wanted to make this book fun and easy to read. To achieve this ease, I had to rewrite the text several times. This was a very valuable experience for me as for a young writer.

I’m especially proud of the most original parts: where I talk about Postcrossing’s place in the world of ideas (from the ancient Greeks’ letters to the 21st century with its technologies and popularity of danish Hygge); the first mail artist Alexander Asarkan in the Soviet Union for whom creating postcards was a way to make conceptual art in totalitarian state; who and how creates postage stamps in Russia (there’s a very interesting interview with the leading artist of the publishing house Marka, where he tells all the details of creating a postage stamp, who works on them, what their values are and what they think about stamps of other countries); the interviews with unforgettable postcrossers; and my favorite part is about how postcards were published and sold before, how the circumstances and place of postcard in people’s lives changed and how we came to what we have now.

I wrote the book in chapters, in order. When I finished one, I gave it to the artist Maria Vasilyeva and she drew the next part of the comics about the adventures of postcrosser Asya. I’m proud of this cartoon too!

Thank you so much Masha, for taking the time to answer our questions about your book! For anyone interested, “Postcrossing — Book of Secret Knowledge” (in Russian-language only) can be purchased on Masha’s store amelie-cards.ru and soon on Wildberries as well.

Today we bring you a friendship story that went beyond borders to bring together Carrick (aka geocarrick) from the USA 🇺🇸 and Milad (aka orange_memo) from Iraq 🇮🇶! Carrick tells the story of how they first got in touch, and eventually met.

Milad contacted me the first time back in September 2010 asking for direct swap, and since I never had received postcards from such a rare country like Iraq, I was thrilled! We swapped a couple of postcards, which I received in November 2010.

I mentioned to him that I’ll send him a postcard from Shanghai World Expo 2010 since I was going there. At the time, I enjoyed visiting the Iraqi pavilion and tasted the famous Iraqi dates over there.

On July, 9th 2011, and much to my surprise, I received Milad’s mail address through the Postcrossing system and mailed him the “Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum postcard” (US-1200218) which he received and registered on July 20th, 2011.

Milad and I kept writing to each other through Postcrossing from time to time. We both enjoy swapping postcards, penpaling and traveling, making new friends and learning new languages and cultures.

On May 2012, Milad wrote saying that his sister and her family were moving from Baghdad to Anaheim (California). At the time I lived close to Anaheim and my postbox was there too, so he wrote to tell me the news and let me know he was going to send some postcards with his sister for me. I met his sister and her family in December of 2012, and got another set of beautiful postcards from Iraq.

We kept exchanging postcards and news from time to time, and on April 2016, Milad let me know he was going to try his shots and apply for a visit visa from the American Embassy in Baghdad. In order to do that though, he needed a sponsor letter. I decided to help him and provided him with an invitation/sponsor letter, and after a lengthy process and much anticipation, Milad was granted his visa and came to California. We were very excited to finally meet on Sep. 22nd 2016. We went to Rodrigo’s Restaurant in Anaheim-CA for a nice dinner (Milad’s first time trying Mexican food) and two days later and on Sep. 24th 2016 I took him on his first-ever visit to Disneyland resort to celebrate his birthday.

We always tell our friends and fellow postcrossers that it’s truly a small world, and how postcards and Postcrossing can shorten distances and build friendships. It’s been almost 4 years since we first met in real life, and we’re still talking about that. We’ve had trips to Disneyland twice and to OC Fair

Thank you Carrick and Milad, for taking the time to tell your story! We love hearing about the friendships and connections that postcards bring to life. 😊