Postcrossing Blog

Last month, we invited everyone to join or organize a meetup in celebration of the website’s upcoming 20th anniversary, and since then, dozens of them have popped up all around the world! 😍 It’s been a joy to see all of these meetings being organized, and that so many of you are planning to attend. The celebrations don’t stop there though!

To mark this special milestone, we want YOU to be part of the celebration — with a photo challenge!

Your mission: grab 20 postcards and take a photo with them! You can hold them up, fan them out like a giant deck of cards, arrange them into a big “20”, or take them to your favorite spot in town, a sunny postbox, your local post office, or anywhere that brings a smile to your face. Be creative, be playful, and above all, be part of the party!

We’ve set up a special gallery to collect all your happy pictures from around the world. Just like in past years, it’s a way to celebrate together, even if we’re all in different places.

📮 Upload your photo and join the celebration! ✨

We can’t wait to see your smiling faces, your postcards, and the beautiful ways you choose to celebrate this special milestone with us. 📮 Let’s make this a birthday to remember — go go go!

Can you believe it? Postcrossing is turning 20 years old in just under two months, on July 14! We’re not quite sure how that happened either… Time flies when you’re sending postcards! Over the years, we’ve heard from postcrossers who joined back in high school, took a break during university and early adulthood, and then found their way back to the project years later to introduce it to their own children. It’s been quite the journey, and we’re happy every single one of you is here to share it with us.

But we’ll save the emotional stuff for later — right now, it’s time to get ready to celebrate! 🎉 And what’s a celebration without friends? So your first mission is to join or organize a Postcrossing meetup around July 14 to mark this big milestone. Whether you’ve been around since the early days or just joined recently, this is a good opportunity to meet fellow postcrossers, share stories, and enjoy some quality postcard-writing time together.

Since the anniversary falls on a Monday, we know it might not be the easiest day for everyone to meet. So feel free to plan your meetup for the weekend before or after! A casual get-together at a coffee shop, a sunny picnic in the park, or even a group trip to a local museum — anything goes, as long as it brings people together in the spirit of Postcrossing. There are a few planned already, but we hope to see lots more pop up in the coming weeks!

To help make these meetups feel extra special (and a bit more connected), we’ve created a special postcard template just for the occasion. You can download it from the 20 Years page and customize it with a photo — for bonus points, we suggest using a picture of a local postbox, if possible! Then just update the details with your meetup location, date, and image credit information, and you’re ready to go. With many meetups around the world using the same design template, we’ll have a shared visual celebration: one postcard, many places!

We hope you’ll join in the fun, wherever you are. Let’s make this a anniversary to remember, filled with laughter, postcards, and lots of new connections! And stay tuned for more anniversary activities coming soon… 😊

Now that the rush of the 80 million milestone is behind us, it’s time to sit down and sift through the data to see how Postcrossing is doing, stats-wise. We know many of you like to check out these posts with numbers and statistics, so let’s get to it!

5,014,287 postcards received

That’s a good 58,827 postcards more than last year, which is great to see! A steady average of 5 million postcards a year is quite impressive and puts us on track to celebrate 100 million postcards sometime in 2029!

29.1 average travel days and 19.2 median travel days

Average travel times keep increasing slightly, year after year, reflecting postal delays, global logistical challenges or just a higher number of postcards traveling over slower routes. However, the median travel days have only slightly increased, indicating that most postcards still arrive in a reasonable timeframe.

27,256,320,327 kms (16,936,292,258 miles) traveled

That’s a little bit more than Voyager 1’s current distance from Earth! 🛰️

19,941 kms (12,391 miles) was the longest distance traveled

Postcard ES-784984 was our long distance winner of 2024, again with the classic combo from Spain to New Zealand! Sabine (aka sabine223) from Germany used the Travel Mode in Spain last February and unknowingly sent the postcard that traveled the longest distance last year, aaaaaaaaaall the way to Neil (aka durbanshark) in Auckland.

The average distance a postcard traveled in Postcrossing in 2024 was around 5,436 kms (or 3,377 miles). It looks like our average postcard easily travels the length of a continent, which is impressive!

1,194,298 postcards were sent from Germany

Germany is once again the country with the most postcards sent in Postcrossing, at just over 1 million postcards per year! 💪 The USA came very close to that magical number, but is not yet over the threshold. Surprisingly, China had a big jump up the charts this year, surpassing Finland and Japan to reach the fifth place in the rankings. Well done! Here’s how the rest of the top 20 chart looks like:

For those unfamiliar with this statistic, here’s a quick explanation: it represents the number of postcards sent from these countries and registered in 2024. This includes some postcards that were sent in 2023 but only registered in 2024, while others requested in 2024 are not included because they’re still in transit and will likely be registered in the coming weeks or months. By focusing on postcards registered within a specific timeframe, we can maintain consistency and make comparisons with previous years more straightforward.

BeckyS sent the most postcards

Looks like BeckyS grabbed first place this year, up from second last year! 😊 The top 5 senders in Postcrossing continue to be from the USA: BeckyS (2,297), ennasor (2,280), Shelleh (2,273), Djain (2,237) and RomaandPaul (2,231) took the top spots. All of them have chosen to exchange postcards within the USA, which speeds things up… as does the fact that the USA does not currently send mail to Russia, a country with slower mail delivery.

If we count only international exchanges though, then ned44440 in Ireland 🇮🇪 takes the cake, with 1,871 postcards sent! Other runner-ups are mapcardcollector 🇬🇧 (1,841), tiinama 🇫🇮 (1,833), SMatti 🇫🇮 (1,827) and uconn 🇺🇸 (1,802).

Åland Islands sent the most postcards per capita

Åland Islands, Finland and Liechtenstein continue to be the top contributors per capita, with Belarus rising through the rankings this year to grab fourth place.

(*) This ranking is calculated per 1,000 inhabitants, for countries with at least 10 members.

October 1 was the day in which more postcards were sent in 2024 (81,810)

As expected, and even with some limits in place, World Postcard Day continues to beat all the records, with about five times more postcards being sent on that day than on any other random day. 😅 It’s a lot of pressure on Postcrossing’s servers and database, but each year we introduce tweaks that seem to improve the situation and help things go smoothly.

Other big days this year were December 1st (the start of the Cards for Literacy initiative), the days around October 1st, and other assorted days between January and March.

November 13 was the day in which more postcards were received in 2024

Usually, the day with most postcards received is sometime in January… but not in 2024! November 13 saw the peak of postcards being registered, with 19,866 of them arriving to their destinations on that day alone. Most of the other high volume days happened between October and January.

Postcards were sent from 224 countries and received in 157 countries

Postcards were sent from an additional 3 countries or territories this year! Woohoo! Thanks to the Travel Mode, more and more postcrossers make an effort to locate a local wifi network, postcards and a post office during their trips abroad, so that they can send some postcards. That’s why the difference between the number of countries that sent postcards and those that received them is relatively large. Neat!

11,572 new forum topics and 892,564 forum posts in 2024

Less new forum topics, but more posts in 2024! The forum continues to be a welcoming space to organize events, swap postcards, play games or just a place where people can chat and get to know each other. This is thanks to our team of volunteer moderators, who do an excellent job keeping things tidy and running smoothly.

1,835 meetups in 62 countries

A slightly higher number of meetups, but the same number of countries! A curious mind might ask whether these 62 countries were the exact same ones that had meetups in 2023… they were not! For instance, Gibraltar, Jordan and Denmark all had meetings in 2024 but did not have them the year before. Wouldn’t it be cool if in the future we could have meetings in 100 different countries? It should be possible!

11,987 email replies

This is how many support emails the team has replied to throughout the year — a mind-boggling average of 32 per day. 🤯 That’s… a lot of emails!

And that’s all, folks! 2024 was another good year for Postcrossing, and these numbers offer a fascinating glimpse into it, highlighting the impressive scale and reach of our community. As we get started in 2025, there’s plenty to look forward to — new milestones, evolving trends, and even more postcards connecting people across the world. Here’s to another great year of postcards and connections!

PS: For those of you who would like to see longer rankings that don’t fit on a blog post, here they are.

Hurray! It’s our birthday! 🥳 Postcrossing celebrates 19 years of joy and connections today, and we’re marking the date with chocolate cookies… and a surprise!

But before that, a big thank you to all postcrossers for being part of this community and for helping make Postcrossing what it is today. It’s been 19 years of stories from around the world, 19 years of learning and sharing… and about one postcard received every 6 seconds — it feels unbelievable, doesn’t it?

Our gratitude goes also to the team and all the volunteers that make Postcrossing run smoothly — and to all of you who have supported the project financially over the years. We wouldn’t have made it this far without your help.

So we hope you can take a moment today to celebrate this anniversary with a little dance, and maybe a cookie or three! And, of course, with postcards too!

Now, about that surprise…

If you were in Postcrossing over a decade ago, you might remember we used to have a small shop… which didn’t see much action, and ended up closing. In recent years though, more and more people have been asking us where they could get Postcrossing merchandising, and we ourselves have long felt that it would be nice to have a platform for the fun stuff we’ve always wanted to make.

Setting up the logistics of a global shop is not an easy feat, but after we found a partner with sustainable production practices and warehouses on a few different continents, the challenge became much simpler. Once we designed the products for our first collection, it still took us quite a while to work through all the (seemingly endless) bureaucracy, but today we’re finally ready to re-launch it.

So, welcome to the new Postcrossing shop!

We’re super excited about the shop relaunch, and we hope you are too — we can’t wait to see all the Postcrossing merch being worn by real postcrossers!! 😍

Now that the shop is in place, every purchase will help support the project and make room for even more postal awesomeness in the future. We have lots of ideas for cool products we want to make and look forward to working with designers to bring them to life. If you have suggestions of things you’d like to see in the shop (other than postcards), let us know in the comments below!

PS: This is a new adventure for us, as we are new to the whole e-commerce thing. Please be patient with us while we iron out all the kinks. 🙏

Over the forum, there’s a fun topic called “You know you’re a postcrosser when…”, started by Jenny (aka Axolotl_) back in 2021. We love seeing what people post there, so we thought we’d share some of the ones which jumped out at us (though it’s very hard to choose!).

One of the earliest posts by Jewell (aka jewelldelis) does seem like a bit of a giveaway, and other members have mentioned similar:

I don’t think I’m quite at that stage myself, but I do wonder sometimes if the person emptying the pillarboxes sees all my postcards pushed in at once and thinks “ah, it’s that one again”! Though it’s rare for me to send as much as Ksenia (aka Xute). She says:

She included a picture, too!

Sometimes it’s not just about us. It’s the way the whole family gets involved. For example, even Shannon (aka MystiqueDeep)'s kids are in on the Postcrossing fun:

It’s not just at home with the neighbours and the local postal workers, either. Kanerva has even been spotted as a postcrosser in a touristy spot:

I’ve been asked about all the postcards I was buying before, but they didn’t know about Postcrossing yet. Don’t worry, I told them all about it!

Quite recently, Sai (aka Boson) shared the fun facts about addresses that he’s learned because of Postcrossing. He says you know you’re a postcrosser when:

Check out his post to see the other things he’s learned!

On another note, Maggie (aka fire_maggie)'s suggestion got me thinking:

Clearly, I need to add this to my travel checklist… Do you know how to ask for stamps in many languages? I think I could manage French, and I always have my wife to ask in Dutch. After that I might be stuck. Better preparation next time!

For those who have a mailbox to open, Nadine (aka Amalaswintha)'s got a suggestion:

I’m kind of relieved I don’t have a mailbox, because I can definitely picture that happening to me. But Kasia (aka kasia_kiwi) has one I definitely relate to:

That was actually my only motivation to go for walks for a while. I used my Postcrossing cards to get me out of the house, because I wouldn’t want to disappoint anyone by not posting their postcards right away!

That was just a selection of all the fun ideas people have shared about what marks them out as postcrossers on the forum. It’s obvious how much time people take over Postcrossing and how much they love this hobby, and it gives us the warm fuzzies. (And as you can see from this post, I’m the same!)

What about you—do you think there’s something very specific that marks you out as a postcrosser?