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There she was: covered in luxurious, velvety purple fabric, with a lone white rose embroidered on her chest. When he laid eyes on her, Martin Fried knew he had to have the special-edition Princess Diana Beanie Baby.

It was 1998 – the height of the Beanie Babies craze when millions bought the tiny plush toys by the truckload, hoping their investments would return great profits.

But Dr. Fried, a 51-year-old pediatrician from Ocean, N.J., collected for the sheer joy of it, and displayed his almost 1,000 Beanie Babies on three walls of “the Beanie Baby Room” in his house. He has since given a few hundred away, and the ones that remain have been relegated to a closet. That doesn't mean they're no longer on display, however.

Tyler Siloski, 26, of Bonita Springs, Fla., has a $15,000 Transformers collection, which he flaunts in a video tour on YouTube.

In a YouTube video that's just over a minute long, Frankenteddy, Addison, Sunny and other pellet-stuffed friends fill the screen, accompanied by the syrupy lyrics of Sugar Sugar by the Archies.

Conventions and trade shows were once the only places people could share their mint-condition baseball cards or acquire new WWE figures, but the Internet has changed the game. Now, social-media sites enable people to add to their collections and show them off like never before, by tapping into international networks of model-train nuts, stamp enthusiasts and the like.

Those with the most toys, so to speak, are raised to demigod status on YouTube, where videos of their extensive collections rack up thousands of hits.

“ We live in this moment where nothing must be thrown out, yet everything is disposable ”— Ken Hillis, editor of Everyday eBay

Tyler Siloski's self-described addiction to Transformers has left a $15,000 dent in his wallet – much of that from figures purchased off eBay. But it's a fair price, says the Florida-based collector, for the Internet fame he's won.

The 26-year-old's YouTube channel – where he posts video reviews of Transformers – has racked up more than 100,000 views, catching attention from as far away as the Philippines.

After receiving several requests, he posted a video tour of his collection in September, when he acquired his 1,000th Transformer.

“Oh, I feel so accomplished, yet so, so poor,” he narrates with a hint of sarcasm, while panning over shelf upon shelf of precisely arranged toys in the two-part tour.

While he says some family members dismiss the figures as “kids' things,” they're outnumbered by collectors who understand his passion.

“Everytime I see this vid I feel somewhat humbled before your mass accumulation of the greatest toys ever,” commented one of his subscribers. “My collection is no where near half yours.”

The Web has also bred a new generation of collectors who might have dismissed their old Pez dispensers as junk had there not been such a healthy market for them on eBay and Craigslist.

“We live in this moment where nothing must be thrown out, yet everything is disposable” said Ken Hillis, editor of Everyday eBay, a collection of essays about the auction site on which millions of objects are bought and sold each day. “I think you see eBay working very well there to tell people that this sense of self and long-term identity can be completely attached to objects.”

When Frank Chang, a bank employee in Markham, Ont., was growing up, he was drawn into comic books by the eye-catching artwork and enthralling storylines of Spider-Man and Daredevil. He's 36 now, and the value of the works has changed for him. He can't even read some of his favourite titles because they're encapsulated –sealed in a plastic holder to raise their value. He hangs them on his wall as art.

Trading and auction sites such as eBay and Craigslist have helped regulate prices in the field, he said. It's easy to spot novice collectors – they're the ones who send prices soaring upward for comics that aren't actually worth much.

“The Internet has really brought a lot of people together in understanding the value of comics,” he said.

It's not a perfect world. Mr. Chang has been on the wrong side of eBay deals gone sour. He once sold an X-Men comic worth $300 to a U.S. collector who claimed he never received the book, though Mr. Chang says his tracking number suggests otherwise.

But bad experiences won't turn him off online dealing. He said 95 per cent of his collection of almost 4,000 comics is sourced from eBay, Craigslist and specialty trading sites.

While he used to paw through cardboard boxes at far-flung specialty shops and conventions, nowadays he spends two hours a week trawling eBay for comic books or posting wanted ads on Craigslist.

“The Internet changed everything,” he explained. “You're able to sift through thousands of comics at the click of a button.”