As people age, like many on this board, magazines and their online versions become less interesting.
The longer you’ve been hunting and shooting, the more it takes to catch and hold your interest. The short of it is, older fellows are not their target audience. They are looking for a younger demographic. Younger readers have less experience, so basic 'how to', hunting and shooting articles get consideration.[/i]
While that's certainly true, which is why the largest-circulation "outdoor" magazine I regularly wrote for 20-30 years ago,
Field & Stream, had a 90% turnover in subscribers every 2-3 years. However, that turnover tends to be less in smaller, more specialized magazines--especially if they continue to run a few articles that continue to interest older readers.
Another major factor is that the average age of hunters and shooters keeps increasing, due to less "recruitment" among younger generations. The last time I looked up the average age of U.S. hunters (at least those who bought licenses) it was pushing 50, and that was a few years ago. The average has continued to rise over the last few decades. Many of those older folks don't hunt or shoot as much as they used to, but still like to read about both--and many still buy guns and related stuff even if they don't shoot and hunt as much as they used to.
As a result, the regular readers of gun/hunting magazines still include a bunch of "mature" folks--often called "Boomers" or "Fudds" by younger hunters and shooters. But they still have a major influence on the gun market--especially in the USA, which is by far the largest sporting-gun market in the world, whether for hunting or target shooting.
Yet some of the owners/publishers of gun magazines concentrate almost entirely on the newest stuff--because it results in the most advertising. In the long run this may not be such a great tactic, because a lot of older readers won't care. And a lot of the younger readers depend more on "free" information they can find on the Internet.
I know a lot of this because I've not only been a staff writer for several major hunting/gun magazines since the 1980s, but due to editing three magazines. As Jack O'Connor noted in
The Last Book, a magazine editor needs to have a feel for what readers want to read--and when advertising starts driving editorial content that "feel" becomes increasingly irrelevant.
On the other hand, the Internet made it possible for writers to go directly to readers, rather than depending on a magazine publishing company. Which is exactly why Eileen and I started
www.riflesandrecipes.com over 20 years ago.
