Re: [Paddlewise] Size of kayaking community?

From: "ralph diaz" <rdiaz_at_ix.netcom.com>

> There is a rule of thumb used in the publishing world.  Basically you expect
> that a mature publication is doing its job if it is reaching about 10 per
> cent of its targeted audience or market.  This formula doesn't always work
> but it certainly gives you something to wrap your hands on.

This is the kind of thing I've been looking for.  I've seen reference to this
kind of analysis before and I think it's a reasonable way to estimate given
a paucity of other info.

> To narrow down the latter look at Sea Kayaker's circulation.  [...]  But you
> may want to doctor that down a bit because it is not audited, say to 20,000.
> Multiply by 10 and you get around 200,000 sea kayakers. 

This sounds like a reasonable number of active participants in North America.
I suppose we can bump it up for non-English speaking countries and for English
countries that have their own magazines (hence low penetration by Sea Kayaker).
It would be interesting to compare this to sales of, say, composite sea kayaks
and high-end plastic SKs.

> Again this formula
> is not perfect.  Runners World for example has a circulation, I believe in
> the 100,000 range (I don't know if I have seen their box they have to
> publish in the fall but I think that figure is about right).  It would then
> suggest that there are 1 million runners but there are a lot more than that,
> i.e. people who regularly run say 2 miles and up several times a week.

This reminds me of cross country skiing in its heyday in the '70s.  It was
estimated that one out of 5 Canadians were XC skiers.  But most of them had
skis but didn't know how to ski etc.  The skis were kept at the cottage.  The
comparison was to swimmers, where 40% of Canadians (or some other huge number)
were claimed to be swimmers.  This meant counting every person who donned 
a bathing suit and entered water.  In fact, swimmers who train or do it for
exercise on a regular basis are relatively few.  Hence: 

> The 24.8 million figure for paddlers is a pipe dream.

Unless we include every person who ever sat in a paddle boat.

This is useful info, Ralph.  Thanks!

Mike
PS - my motivation is estimating sales potential for a widget that might
reasonably only interest a "serious" paddler.  Nothing real yet, just 
floating ideas.


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