I started selling comics full-time in 2010 and wanted to track my progress against the online back issue markets. Here’s a look at the current comics aftermarket and my progress in achieving my goal of becoming a prominent back issue dealer.
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one month change | one year change | five year change | |
| Listings in eBay’s Comic Books, Manga & Memorabilia section | 4,676,513 | +6.37% | -19.97% | +23.96% |
| Cyberspace Comics listings | 148,523 | +0.98% | +13.50% | +39.85% |
| Cyberspace Comics “market share” of comic listings on eBay | 3.18% | -5.20% | +41.78% | +12.62% |
| Number of eBay comic listings that are auctions | 297,681 | +3.84% | +16.29% | +120.61% |
| Percentage of eBay comic listings up for auction | 6.37% | -2.37% | +45.33% | +77.81% |
| Number of listings sold in eBay’s comics section (90 days) | 1,319,835 | +4.50% | -12.05% | +128.95% |
| Number of listings sold in eBay’s comics section divided by current listings | 28.22% | -1.77% | +9.90% | +84.70% |
 Total number of listings in eBay’s “comics” section My current eBay feedback (unique): 96,993 |
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one month change | one year change | five year change | |
| Listings on Atomic Avenue | 2,753,450 | +50.28% | +63.44% | +83.89% |
| Listings in the Cyberspace Comics Store on Atomic Avenue | 129,367 | +0.80% | +9.98% | +27.25% |
| Cyberspace Comics “market share” of comic listings on AtomicAvenue | 4.70% | -32.98% | -32.78% | -30.80% |
| Number of unique issues on Atomic Avenue | 257,026 | +0.57% | +5.95% | +3.33% |
| Cyberspace Comics “market share” of unique issues on AtomicAvenue | 50.33% | +0.22% | +3.80% | +23.15% |
 Total number of comics listed on Atomic Avenue |
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one month change | one year change | five year change | |
| Number of members on ComicCollectorLive | 239,820 | +0.14% | +2.28% | +61.84% |
| Number of items for sale on ComicCollectorLive | 1,302,925 | -3.81% | -4.87% | -15.88% |
| Number of items sold on ComicCollectorLive | 2,799,105 | +0.24% | +3.97% | +24.75% |
| Number of stores open on ComicCollectorLive | 48 | +2.13% | -2.04% | -34.25% |
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one month change | one year change | five year change | |
| Number of listings in HipComic’s Comic Books section | 1,230,882 | +7.26% | +129.05% | +432.17% |
| Number of those listings that are in the Cyberspace Comics HipComic store | 138,646 | +1.32% | +5.39% | +31.93% |
| Cyberspace Comics “market share” of comic listings on HipComic | 11.26% | -5.50% | -53.99% | -75.21% |
eBay‘s reported number of listings is now removing suppressed listings and I’m now unable to find a way to add those back in to their total so from now on we’re going to go with their reported number. I know they are suppressing listings from this number because a prominent comic dealer (NK) had their reported figure drop substantially. They are known for listing multiple copies of the same book in a lot of different grades. A search in their store for Action 687 returns four results but, there is a small notation in their eBay store that they actually have 48 results for that search. I do not see a way to display all 48 results, though. Naturally, with a different method of calculating their number of listings now being used, our numbers are going to show some major swings over previous dates. Eventually, this will normalize.
Atomic Avenue: The number of listings on this marketplace increased by 50% of the past month. That’s an incredible increase – almost impossibly so. To make things even more odd, the number of unique available issues only increased by 0.57%. It’ll be interesting, next month, to see how many total listings they have.
Comic Collector Live: The number of stores has dropped by over 33.33% in the past five years.
HipComic‘s number of listings have increased by over 100% in the past year.