One of the ways that the Internet has changed stamp collecting is that it has added a great deal of transparency and equality in the pricing of more esoteric items. By example, about 1975, I began to collect Mozambique Company postal history. I was always fascinated by the Portuguese African Colonies and their exploitive character, especially the fact that most of the Colonies really were little more than trading entities that controlled only a few coastal cities. Mozambique Company epitomized this-it was a chartered trading company given governance rights. Early Mozambique Company stamps were common and were the mainstay of every world wide packet in the 1950s and it is questionable whether many of the stamps were ever on sale in the colony or whether they went right to packet makers from the printers. But covers from Mozambique Company were always scarce as there was little correspondence.
So I began buying Mozambique Company pre World War II covers whenever I saw them at shows and since, in those days I went to 40 shows a year, I soon had pretty much emptied the dealer boxes of them. I was usually paying about $25 for them and as soon as it became known that I would buy any that I saw (I was young and single and had more money than brains-and I didn’t have much money!) the price went up and up pretty fast. I stopped buying them at about $80 each.
The Internet makes such price gouging in specialty areas less likely. When someone begins to buy material in areas for which material is scarce but for which there really is little demand, the vastness of the Ebay (and other stamp auction forums) soon brings whatever latent quantities of this material to the market. When prices increase then it is because of true scarcity and not because one or two collectors have entered an otherwise dormant field. This makes starting a specialty easier from two points of view. First, the Internet obviously gives access to the world’s market and second, collectors in new areas no longer find that they are bidding for material against people who are planing to sell it to them, thus pushing up prices against themselves.