Newsstand Versions 1 1

[mr_highgrade]

21 minutes ago, jfur said:

Of course no one 'knows' what the percentage of distribution is and there is no definitive way to validate it.  All we have are our assumptions based on information at hand - even settling on "2,000/3,000" per issue sold, we assume some were returned, we assume some were thrown out at the newsstand, and we assume that single issue readers may or may not have just tossed once read.  Either way, the number gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller every variable you toss in.

You make some good arguments, but if every newsstand vendor sold multiple copies of every issue at every chain, we would still have Marvel selling at Newsstands today.  What's theoretically possible isn't always probable.  Absolutely, of course there could be storage full of these things, and thousands of people sitting on them not knowing they even have them, but, they're relatively unavailable at this point in time which makes them rare by definition.  Until they're found and available to the market, they'll remain rare.

Whether it's 1%, 5%, hell, even 10%, doesn't change the fact that they're hard to find - being hard to find supports the argument of a relatively low print run.  

 

Not only are they tough to find, they're almost impossible to find in high grade. 

[RockMyAmadeus]

12 hours ago, jfur said:

Of course no one 'knows' what the percentage of distribution is and there is no definitive way to validate it.  All we have are our assumptions based on information at hand - even settling on "2,000/3,000" per issue sold, we assume some were returned, we assume some were thrown out at the newsstand, and we assume that single issue readers may or may not have just tossed once read.  Either way, the number gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller every variable you toss in.

Sure, but since there's no way to know what that number 1. starts at, 2. finishes at, there's quite literally no way to estimate anything...EXCEPT that we can be reasonably assured, unlike what the uninformed on blog sites claim, that that number didn't START at "several hundred."

"Sold" means "not returned", by the way, or "not thrown out at the newsstand."

And, while it's true that "single issue readers" are more likely to toss once read, that likelihood is far, far less than in the past. I imagine most newsstand readers would keep what they have, or, if they didn't want them anymore, trade them to a comic store or used bookstore or what have you. Very few buyers of comics since the 1990s have really just "tossed them."

12 hours ago, jfur said:

You make some good arguments, but if every newsstand vendor sold multiple copies of every issue at every chain, we would still have Marvel selling at Newsstands today. 

Disagree entirely, but that wasn't my claim. Even if a mere HALF of those vendors sold a SINGLE COPY per issue...which is obviously untrue...that still results in thousands and thousands of copies sold per issue.

12 hours ago, jfur said:

What's theoretically possible isn't always probable. 

True, but again, not my claim.

12 hours ago, jfur said:

Absolutely, of course there could be storage full of these things, and thousands of people sitting on them not knowing they even have them, but, they're relatively unavailable at this point in time which makes them rare by definition.

That's not accurate. "Lack of availability" is not what defines "rare." "Hard to find" is what demonstrates a lack of availability.

12 hours ago, jfur said:

Until they're found and available to the market, they'll remain rare.

Until they're available to the market, they'll remain hard to find...not rare.

12 hours ago, jfur said:

Whether it's 1%, 5%, hell, even 10%, doesn't change the fact that they're hard to find - being hard to find supports the argument of a relatively low print run.  

Not true.

Again, look at my 1903-O Morgan dollar example. There were millions made...and while most of those were almost certainly destroyed as a result of the Pittman Act of 1918, that still left hundreds of thousands, locked away forgotten in gov't vaults. Generations of coin collectors thought they were, in fact, exceedingly rare...but they weren't. At no point after their production in 1903 have they ever been rare. Not even close to it. The coin collecting community was showered with hundreds of thousands of examples from 1962-1964.

The point is, though, that the collectors...even the most knowledgeable...had no idea what was hidden away. You can't know what you don't know, after all. So, they would have said "yes, these coins are extremely rare"...not knowing the truth.

As said before...coins don't work like comics, true...but as I explained at great length in my previous post, because of the nature of newsstand distribution, a book can have tens of thousands of examples, distributed far and wide, still in existence, but be entirely unavailable to the market...in that sense, being "hard to find" doesn't support the argument of a "relatively low print run" at all.

The answer, as I said, is that no one knows. And, until and if the generation of readers that has them (IF they have them) decides to put them back on the market, we'll never really know how common...or not...they are.

Edited September 5, 2018 by RockMyAmadeus

[jfur]

We can agree to disagree - but that's what makes good conversation.

[divad]

On 6/1/2018 at 6:53 PM, RockMyAmadeus said:

I think, and your comment tends to confirm it, that at least a few comic shops had newsstand accounts, too. Because of the lag time between Direct and newsstand, that meant that they'd get in books that might have sold out as Direct versions. I suspect that's the case.

This is total conjecture.

[FlyingDonut]

On 9/4/2018 at 11:34 PM, RockMyAmadeus said:

And even those numbers are probably reallllly low. With estimates of roughly 70k copies sold in 2011 in the Direct market, it's not totally reasonable to imagine that newsstand sales would be 1%-3% of those numbers. The books still sold. Not great, which is why Marvel pulled out of the market...but they still sold.

Well....if there was 70,000 copies of Amazing Spider-Man 26 sold in the direct market, following your math then there would be 700-2,100 newsstand copies. That's still pretty low, especially if you're looking for high grade copies. Flash forward to a time period when a books sold 48,000 copies - again, following your math - you'd have a low estimate of 480 copies, which is pretty low.

[RockMyAmadeus]

2 minutes ago, FlyingDonut said:

Well....if there was 70,000 copies of Amazing Spider-Man 26 sold in the direct market, following your math then there would be 700-2,100 newsstand copies. That's still pretty low, especially if you're looking for high grade copies. Flash forward to a time period when a books sold 48,000 copies - again, following your math - you'd have a low estimate of 480 copies, which is pretty low.

No...read it again. I said it's NOT totally reasonable to imagine newsstand sales would be 1%-3%. Let me be more emphatic: it's totally UNreasonable to estimate that low.

[RockMyAmadeus]

1 hour ago, divad said:

This is total conjecture.

No, it's not.

 

[FlyingDonut]

Oh OK. Got it. Late on the east coast.

[RockMyAmadeus]

10 minutes ago, FlyingDonut said:

Oh OK. Got it. Late on the east coast.

You're up too late. You going to be at Baltimore (he asked, knowing what a stupid question that was)...?

I'll stop by your booth and say hi.

 

[Lazyboy]

18 hours ago, jfur said:

We can agree to disagree - but that's what makes good conversation.

There is no disagreement on which to agree. There is only reality and your lack of comprehension.

Quote

even settling on "2,000/3,000" per issue sold, we assume some were returned ... Either way, the number gets smaller, and smaller, and smaller every variable you toss in.

Nobody settled on those numbers, although they may not be absurdly far off by the very end of Marvel's newsstand distribution.

Assuming, just for a moment and for the sake of argument, that sales were actually that low, the returns came out of the many, many thousands more that were printed. You can't say "Oh, but Newsstands were returnable, so let's cut that 3000 in half to get 1500. Oh, but Newsstands were returnable, so let's cut that 1500 in half to get 750. Oh, but Newsstands were returnable, so let's cut that 750 in half to get 375. Oh, but Newsstands were returnable, so..." If Brilliant Blog Boy Ben wasn't already a member here, I might think you were him due to that same faulty reasoning.

Also, if you believe that none of the "unsold/returned" Newsstand copies still exist, how many bridges would you like to buy? I've got some really nice ones available, cheap!

Quote

being hard to find supports the argument of a relatively low print run

Nobody disputes that they are relatively hard to find or had relatively low print runs and sales. What people take issue with are the ridiculous numbers that are invented out of thin air and the atrocious reasoning and lack of understanding about how things actually work(ed).

[FlyingDonut]

8 hours ago, RockMyAmadeus said:

You're up too late. You going to be at Baltimore (he asked, knowing what a stupid question that was)...?

I'll stop by your booth and say hi.

 

I will be there, running the big booth again. Everyone should stop by and buy comics from me. I believe that if our booth was a store, we would have more comics than 95% of any of the comic book stores in the United States - probably 250 long boxes worth of books. Something for everyone!

[jfur]

4 hours ago, Lazyboy said:

There is no disagreement on which to agree. There is only reality and your lack of comprehension.

Nobody settled on those numbers, although they may not be absurdly far off by the very end of Marvel's newsstand distribution.

Assuming, just for a moment and for the sake of argument, that sales were actually that low, the returns came out of the many, many thousands more that were printed. You can't say "Oh, but Newsstands were returnable, so let's cut that 3000 in half to get 1500. Oh, but Newsstands were returnable, so let's cut that 1500 in half to get 750. Oh, but Newsstands were returnable, so let's cut that 750 in half to get 375. Oh, but Newsstands were returnable, so..." If Brilliant Blog Boy Ben wasn't already a member here, I might think you were him due to that same faulty reasoning.

Also, if you believe that none of the "unsold/returned" Newsstand copies still exist, how many bridges would you like to buy? I've got some really nice ones available, cheap!

Nobody disputes that they are relatively hard to find or had relatively low print runs and sales. What people take issue with are the ridiculous numbers that are invented out of thin air and the atrocious reasoning and lack of understanding about how things actually work(ed).

hahahaha there's only reality and my lack of comprehension?  Wow, that's pretty bold of you to say.  Had to go the keyboard warrior route, huh?

You're only reading what you want to read.  

[RockMyAmadeus]

27 minutes ago, jfur said:

hahahaha there's only reality and my lack of comprehension?  Wow, that's pretty bold of you to say.  Had to go the keyboard warrior route, huh?

You're only reading what you want to read.  

He's completely correct. You took a hypothetical, extreme estimate, made for the sake of the argument, and "settled" on that number as a baseline of sales, rather than the extreme hypothetical I presented it as...and then, even further, you started to subtract from that number by referring to "returns"...which, by definition, aren't included in sales numbers. 

That is a lack of comprehension. You can choose to be offended, or you can say "oops...my bad, I misspoke" and we can continue on from there.

Here's, again, what I said: 

Quote

ASM has always been a top seller at the newsstand, so even if ASM only accounted for 1% of those sales....keeping in mind that these are all estimates..that's still 2,000-3,000 copies per issue sold at the newsstand,

(emphasis added; "those sales" refers to total comics sold on the newsstand in 2013 as reported by John Jackson Miller of Comichron, approximately 5.5 million.)

So, no, I didn't settle on those sales numbers, as some sort of baseline...I presented them as being on the lowest end of the potential sales for each issue.

Again...even if a mere half the vendors of newsstand comics in the US in 2011-2013 sold a single copy of each issue...that is thousands upon thousands of copies sold. And it's not reasonable to assume that that was the case, which means that there were possibly tens of thousands of copies sold of each issue of ASM at the newsstand. 

Even ten thousand copies sold is a mere 200 for each and every state in the union, and not even counting Canada and/or Mexico, if such distribution took place. I would imagine 200 copies of each issue were sold in NYC alone.

I suspect that Lazyboy's contention that those numbers (2-3k copies sold per issue) was not far off by the very end of Marvel's newsstand distribution...and though Amazing was "cancelled" (again), its successor, Superior Spiderman, was still being distributed on the newsstand well into 2013, the last year of Marvel's newsstand presence...is correct.

Edited September 6, 2018 by RockMyAmadeus

[FlyingDonut]

OK - and please note this is without question not statistically accurate - I've crunched a couple numbers.

2001
There are currently 59 copies of Amazing Spider-Man 36 for sale on eBay. Of those, 12 are newsstands. That's roughly a 20% ratio, which sounds about right.

Comichron shows Diamond orders of 92,765 for that book, so a ratio of 4-1 would equal about 18,867 newsstand copies.

2011
There are currently 35 copies of Amazing Spider-Man 669 for sale on eBay. Of those 2 are newstands. That's a 5.7% ratio, which again sounds about right.

Comichron shows Diamond orders of 71,944 for that book, so a 5.7% ratio would equal about 4,111 newsstand copies.

Again, not nearly accurate, but I think it passes the smell test - 20% of the direct market for a monster book in 2001 on newsstands vs. 5.7% in 2011?

[divad]

58 minutes ago, FlyingDonut said:

Take any two other ASMs in the same time frame and this example fails miserably. E.g., ASM 34 - 39 Direct / 4 Newsstands (10%) and ASM 650 - 15 Direct / 0 Newsstands (0%). You are not going to find a statistical model that fits.

Edited September 6, 2018 by divad

[divad]

16 hours ago, RockMyAmadeus said:

No, it's not.

 

Facts? Bah, humbug.

[Lazyboy]

17 hours ago, divad said:

On 6/1/2018 at 8:53 PM, RockMyAmadeus said:

I think, and your comment tends to confirm it, that at least a few comic shops had newsstand accounts, too. Because of the lag time between Direct and newsstand, that meant that they'd get in books that might have sold out as Direct versions. I suspect that's the case.

This is total conjecture.

It might be conjecture that Harrison John's LCS had a newsstand account, but it is fact that some comic shops had them. Also, shops without newsstand accounts may still have had other dealings  with newsstand distributors.

[divad]

1 minute ago, Lazyboy said:

It might be conjecture that Harrison John's LCS had a newsstand account, but it is fact that some comic shops had them. Also, shops without newsstand accounts may still have had other dealings  with newsstand distributors.

Name one and give a primary source.

[Lazyboy]

5 hours ago, jfur said:

hahahaha there's only reality and my lack of comprehension?  Wow, that's pretty bold of you to say.  Had to go the keyboard warrior route, huh?

You're only reading what you want to read.  

What I'm reading seems like it's coming from somebody who doesn't understand the newsstand market and has been reading far too much of the rarecomics blog without the knowledge that would enable them to separate fact from ridiculous fiction.

[Lazyboy]

2 hours ago, divad said:

2 hours ago, Lazyboy said:

It might be conjecture that Harrison John's LCS had a newsstand account, but it is fact that some comic shops had them. Also, shops without newsstand accounts may still have had other dealings  with newsstand distributors.

Name one and give a primary source.

At least one board member who used to have a store has mentioned it in the past, but I can't recall who. But then there's this, as well.