We own half a billion dollars worth of LEGO!
Posted by Huw,
If you keep an eye on the site statistics at the bottom of the page you may have noticed a significant landmark was passed overnight: we now own US$500 million of LEGO between us!
Let's analyse that number in more detail to see what other interesting figures we can uncover...
We have 180,000 signed-up members although not all of us records our collection on the site. 156,800 of us do, though, and between us we own 18,100,000 sets containing 4,799,000,000 pieces.
We can thus calculate that the average Brickset member has spent about £3200 on their collection, and owns 115 sets containing 30,500 pieces.
The 18 million sets we own contain 37,600,000 minifigs, more than the entire population of Canada, which is an average of 255 each.
While I'm writing about stats, here are a few others of interest:
- When CapnRex101 recorded the size of our collective collection on Christmas Day last year we owned 17,649,000 sets between us. We've thus added 524,000 sets since then, an average of 3.3 each.
- The last time I posted an article about collection size was in June 2014 when we crossed the $200 million mark. The time before that was August 2012, when we reached $100 million. In 2014 the average size of our collections was 85 sets, so we are still all spending and increasing the size of our collection.
- 80,000 people have become members in the two years since I wrote welcoming our 100,000th member. That's an average of around 110 a day. Welcome, everyone!
The next landmark worth writing about will be when we reach 1 billion dollars, which I reckon will be in about 2021. So, until then, keep spending and recording your acquisitions here!
Image is of a 500 million Yugoslav Dinar note from Wikimedia.
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86 comments on this article
I always suspected I spend too much money on Lego :)
Still quite a way to go until you can use the image of the Zimbabwean 100 trillion dollar note... ;)
I don't know whether to be proud or ashamed... Either way, don't tell the spouse!
What an accomplishment. Congratulations! I love Brickset, a site that I visit, daily. Thank you for supporting the LEGO fan community like you do. Much appreciated. Cheers, Ron
Maybe when we hit 5,000,000,000 owned pieces you could make an article about how many pieces we own by theme and by year and other stats just like the personal 'Sets collection analysis'.
Anyway, I hope to see more of these funny and interesting statistical articles, but 2021 is going to be a long time.
@Bananaworld - that’s just the figure from the sets we tell the other half about... I suspect the real figure is probably double that...
The LEGO sets, even yours, are all MINE !!!
Wow! impressive collection Brickset! Grats to all of you (us) to collect such a huge amount of parts and minifigs. What MOC'S or Lego city or layout that could be! That is clearly a community. Thanks for the article and stats, interesting.
The amount on everything I bought that is listed on here is $13,113.00
It will be al more I guess. I don't list all sets I've got. All my stuff before I went into my dark ages isn't listed. The sets from children either.
There are a fair few sets with no Retail Price (nearly half the sets in my collection) so the true value will be higher!
Could you somehow use the BrickLink prices where no retail price is available?
So you assume that everyone here lists their actual collection and does not just “inflate” their collection by clicking on “I own” on the sets?
So rich is the AFOL spending power!
It's been a while since I've seen Yugoslav dinar.. There's an interesting story behind these banknotes. In late 80's, Yugoslavia started to collapse and economy was suffering very much with high inflation. My father told me when he bought a car in 1990, he paid 19 million dinars, but he got the car 3 months later due to long waiting periods. At that time, the price for the same car climbed up to 53 million dinars. It was often said money lost its value so fast the government couldn't keep up with adding additional zeroes on the banknotes and print them.
We would have hit the half billion months ago had the falcon been in stock...
A pleasure to be a contributor to these crazy figures :)
@Paperballpark That's cute, but not the largest ever. Have you heard of the infamous hundred million billion pengo note? http://www.thegoldstandardnow.org/key-blogs-6/2322-the-100-quintillion-pengo-note
That number is so big, they couldn't fit all the zeroes on the note do they just wrote it with letters instead.
Yay, I'm above average!
Great job everyone :)
Zionesify, what could be the interest for someone to say "I have this set" when it's not true? I know lie is in human nature, but I really hope (and am probably naive to think like this) that this is true only for a very few of BS registered users... I use My collection to check sometimes when I had this or that (and much more often check the sets I want!) but I don't see the interest of inflate a collection. I have registered any single set I own, from UCS to free polybag or so, even my daughter's Friends and Elves coming from magazines, and sets I still have at home from my childhood. But to register the UCS MF 75192 I would really like to get just for... Inflate my own collection, I really can't see any interest in doing so. And do many of us go and check other's collection? For me it's more a tool than something concerning vanity or pride. And telling others "hey look at my beautiful and huge collection, it's bigger than yours" is useless to me. But... now thinking about it, I'm pretty sure you must be right...
And if you could all please ship it to me, my address is ... :)
@Zionesify and Brick't: some people tick 'I own' when they have built a set from bricks in their collection. Other people tick 'I own' when they used to own it, but don't remove the tick when they sell or give the set away. Probably not a big percentage, but might be significant.
Wow, what a number.
Using the total number of pieces mentioned as a base, I can now calculate that I own 0.006% of them.
:-)
it is in us $. but not in all countries is the price the same in us$ and not all sets the members have listed are bought for full price. and i think there ist a very very huge difference between listprices and that was really paid for it, and some sets are higher in price now as the official retailprices.
I have so many sets that I haven’t added to my owned list, I shudder to think what they’re worth and how much they have cost me...
I'm at the point where I'm out of room so am now looking at only keeping what I really enjoy and selling the rest off. In addition to keeping my future purchases down. I can't justify buying a bigger house just so I have more room for Lego.
^^ Ditto LukeSkywalker! I'm slowly but surely going through mountains and mountains of childhood parts, trying to correspond parts to instruction manuals I have remaining (and online inventories of sets on here as instruction books aren't what they are now!) and making sure those sets are complete before registering them here. I'm also 100% sure that I am missing LOTS of instruction books - particularly small town/castle/pirate/space sets from the 80's - so that's going to be a case of picking unusual parts and cross-referencing what sets they came in then trying to put them together that way. The money really is quite scary!
And I realise I spend way too much on Lego.
I'll admit I'm a nerd when it comes to tracking sets I own. Way back in the day I used notecards, then it was a spreadsheet when the stack of notecards got unmanageable, and now Brickset. Pathetically, I still maintain the spreadsheet as well :-)
I'm in for 10 grand of it myself
Yes, I love Lego but I need to control my expenses, not.
Makes me even more proud to be part of Brickset!!!!
What is the most common set we all share together huw?
You can find that out, and much more, by using the queries:
https://brickset.com/queries/featured
All parts are Space parts.
That’s a lot of space parts.
All I got from that article is that collectively we own the population of Canada.
I think I read it too quickly.
I have an exactly average number of LEGO sets and slightly below average number of parts. That's neat.
I haven't even recorded my entire collection on here
That means we're all rich right?! Oh, wait, that's not how that works is it? Lol. I was actually checking out the Site Statistics yesterday and saw the figure then at just short of a half billion and was wondering how long it would take to reach that half way point. Turns out not long huh :) Thanks for a great site and I'm all in for going broke together!
Surprisingly, I am really close on all those averages! (I do have a lot of loose parts and old sets tough)
This is really cool! Congrats to all of us.
This moment is what all good Lego fans should look forward to. Congrats on spending to much.
If you ask my wife, at least half of that is sitting in the garage
There's no such thing as "too much". There's only, "Look! There's another I don't have," and, "But, wait! There's more!"
Thanks again Huw for the link to those tools. I did not even knew they were available and are pretty interesting indeed. And I see this article generates so many comments and questions. BS community in action, and self introspection of what is the real place of our passion for the little brick in our lives. I'm not a fan of stats, but have to say that they can't lie and shows us things as they are, which can be helpful sometimes :) I'm sure more high decisions concerning collections and money spent will be taken following this article, even more than at new year's eve!
When 75192 is once again available for sale I will certainly be doing my bit to add to that.
wow that's a lot of LEGO
I keep telling my wife my size is above average, now I have proof!
Not sure if that's exciting or depressing... haha
Not sure about whether I should be proud to be above average, or deeply concerned. XD Oh well. LEGO collecting is such a wonderful hobby and I'm happy to share it with all of you. :)
I was going to suggest we all sell everything and buy an island/country, but, we would be the ones buying the Lego others were selling so, back to the drawingboard.
Seems like star wars and modulars are the most popular/owned amongst the members
Thank you for running this site! I visit almost daily and I must admit that I really love it. I have just a small collection ranking on famous 16490th place, but it feels great to contribute to the half billion : )
Brickset T-shirts anyone? : )
I haven't added much of mine for a couple of years now (Too scared the wife might somehow find out)
that's actually not a lot compared to profits made by Lego. only a small minority of all Lego stuff bought.
OMG! I own more than $10,000 worth of Lego! Oh MY GOD!
Well, you might be hitting that billion mark sooner than you think! I only entered my Star Wars sets into my collection. Wait until I load all my wives and sons City, Creator, Friends, Ninjago, etc. etc. .... 100 Ka-Zillion over night!!!
401 sets, nearly 86,000 pieces, 489 figures, good for $7730 (even though it's about $6700-7000 when bought)
Is average = mean or = median? The former is probably meaningless as I'd imagine that there are some serious collectors here, with serious disposable income, (or many free sets for review ;-) that would skew the mean.
piff it's is only $500 million.
Now if it was £500 million that be batter :P
*sings rule britannia.*
Yay!!! We did it you guys! We did it! We're finally stinkin' rich! Whooohoooo!
Don't tell the wife...;)
@Zionesify, Many of the sets I have marked as owned are ones where I have identified a fairly large chunk of a set, but have not finished reassembling from my thrift-shop purchases. I mark them as owned so I can add them in ACM. Many are probably missing some parts, but there are also a lot of parts that I have not linked to a particular set, so I'm guessing it balances out.
Please don't tell The Wife.
I hope that one day you'll get the chance to use the largest Yugoslav bill as illustration (500 billion dinars).
I don't know whether to celebrate or rethink my life...
Funny thing is, I own exactly 255 minifigs -- exactly the average :)
That’s awesome! I just added another $70. :P
I account for nearly $23,000. Not too bad in the grand scheme.
Apparently I helped contribute to that number as I added in a large chunk of my known sets around 1am. I'm at 460 sets, 573 figs, 68,813 pieces. But I'm guessing I have another 100-125 sets to find, finish, etc and add and probably another15-20000 loose pieces.
Yeah, some may have marked I Own but don't just to inflate, but I'll wager that number is pretty immaterial. I would wager a decent number marked I Own, person no longer owns, and just didn't uncheck. But still probably not huge. And I'm quite sure of the 156k that have inventoried, almost everyone has not fully inventoried. So in all the numbers should be higher than they are.
I obtain mostly through bargain hunting, so I know I paid considerably less than my provided retail value. But still an interesting number.
Just need to take into account what the numbers contain and roughly what's not accounted for, and they are pretty interesting numbers see to say the least.
As mentioned, the figure would undoubtedly be more due to the unrecorded collections. A reasonable modular street collection alone would be more then $1000. ($250 AU each, the average modular price).
I think I have one of those money bills in the picture...
This is awesome in the best description of that word, to say that this fills me with awe. Let's push to a billion!
Thank you for this site !!! It's helping me for hours every day ...
I did my fair share but,
"My name is Felix Mezei and for the last 43 days I didn't buyed a LEGO set"
I was just getting around to adding some of my Star Wars minifigure collection last night. So happy to contribute to getting us over the goal!
Never tell my wife this fact. She’ll just assume most of that is mine.
That's all, cmon people of brickset buy more LEGO!
Yaaaay, congrats everyone! What a milestone!! We......probably should save more money... ;P
excellent
That's a lot of money.
Sometimes I wonder how the number of sets one owns are calculated here on Brickset.
Does that figure include or exclude the collectable minifigures? Same question for anything grouped under "gear", included in sets owned or not?
@Batupintar for figures anyways depends how people enter them. Some enter figures as individual sets. I enter the whole series as a set.
Consider also that not all sets have retail prices available. A good 25% of my sets have no retail price price listed (probably because of their age) and appear as being worth Zero dollars in the database.
I imagine the true value of Brickset's collection is even larger than this. :)
About a quarter of my sets owned I acquired for free either thru VIP points or Amazon/eBay shop with points systems. And when considering discounts and on-sale deals, I've paid a lot less than what the Brickset DB price has. Like others tho, I have many older sets (classic space and castle) without a listed RRP and some of those I paid well above the original RRP. But even with those calculated in I've paid less overall for my whole collection than what Brickset guesstimates.
If you budget $2500 a year for sets and manage to allocate all of that each year, you can get a pretty descent ball-park number over time that better reflects how much you've spent overall.
The size of your sets collection is currently ranked 1298th.
I think I have a problem...
I wonder where my money gone to all this while ...now i know where it goes . And hopefully my wife did not know this web site;)
Regarding why people would lie or put in their collection sets they don’t have. I do that, not for the purpose of lying on Brickset but because I track sets my parents have that were mine or my brothers’ when we were kids. I also track some sets I’ve bought for them sort of a family collection. I have a « not mine » category and a « not at home » category. ;)
Either way, those are big numbers!
Cheers,
Alex.