With a few clicks on the TV remote or computer mouse, sportsmen and women can find a seemingly inexhaustible supply of information available about their outdoor pursuits. In this ever-changing media landscape, it’s important to keep an eye on where and how your customers prefer to receive their information. In an earlier post, we summarized some conclusions about the media consumption habits of hunters and shooters. Now we’ll take a look at similar data for anglers.

As with the previous blog post, this data comes from the most recently available results from Southwick Associates’ Media Monitor. Southwick issues its Media Usage Statistics for Anglers, Hunters, and Shooters, quarterly, and the following information is from the most recently available report for Second Quarter 2016.

As with hunters and shooters, anglers cite websites (68.3%) and magazines (63.5%) as their preferred sources of information. TV gets 10% more attention from anglers, however, than it does from hunters and shooters, with 47.2% of AnglerSurvey.com respondents saying they watched a fishing show at least once in the past quarter.

The report analyzes the results from nearly 4,000 responses to an email invitation to registered participants at ShooterSurvey.com®, HunterSurvey.com® and AnglerSurvey.com®. Response data is paired with previous response data to match hunting, shooting and fishing activities and purchases in the last year with media consumption habits.

 To overcome biases common to online surveys, the respondents are weighted to reflect the true population of U.S. anglers, shooters and hunters based on their activities, avidity, age, income, geography and more. 

Age of respondents to the most recent quarterly hunting/shooting survey were as follows:

18 to 24           1.2%

25 to 34           15.3%

35 to 44           17.5%

45 to 54           35.1%

55 to 64           17.9%

65+                  13.0%

As mentioned earlier and as illustrated below, websites and magazines ruled the day in the second quarter as information sources for hunters and shooters.

The following chart gives a more complete picture of how anglers use media. While activity tends to ramp up in the third and fourth quarters among hunters and shooters, media usage tends to be more consistent throughout the year among fishing enthusiasts. 

For television programming among anglers, Major League Fishing led with 14.6% of anglers viewing, followed by Lindner’s Fishing Edge (14.4%), Bill Dance Outdoors (13.5%), Bassmasters (13.5%) and Lindner’s Angling Edge (13.3%) were the top-ranked shows.

Among websites, Cabela’s (37.7%) and Bass Pro Shops (35.9%) are the most popular, followed by “Fish/Wildlife Agency for my State” at 32.7%. Among social media sites, Facebook led with 33.4%, followed by YouTube (25.4%), Google+ (10.4%), Instagram (8.7%), Twitter (7.5%), and Pinterst (4.9%).