BACKSTORY
Part III: Cast Your Bread Upon the Waters — Just Make Sure the Tide Is Coming In
Fish Spotting
My enthusiasm for the subject material — I’m a lifelong model sailplane builder and flyer — made me blind to the actual size of the audience for the New RC Soaring Digest. How could anybody not be interested in this, I often thought. Turns out, though, the interest was so narrowly defined and specialised, the publication was doomed from the start to a purgatory of low readership in absolute numbers. It was killing in its razor-thin target demographic — and nearly invisible in every other.
Surprisingly in this wired age, it’s still quite difficult to determine precisely how many distinct eyeballs attached to human beings are reading a given publication. Taking everything into account and based on the hard data which was available, a reasonably educated guess would be a total, worldwide audience for the New RCSD was around 5,000 or so.
Lack of absolute precision, however, was a moot point. Whether it was a bit more or a bit less didn’t matter. To even contemplate whether the New RCSD — or any publication, for that matter — might eventually be financially viable, five-thousand is too small by at least one order of magnitude and more likely two or maybe even more. Sure, five-thousand people in one auditorium listening to one person is a lot of people who also happen to be highly engaged. The same number of people scattered across the globe who are marginally engaged — that’s a vanishingly small number.
Finally, an Easily Baited Hook
Aviation is quirky in the sense it has a stratospheric interest-to-participation ratio. According to the International Council of Air Shows ² between 10 and 12 million people attend an air show each year in North America alone. Compare this to the number who have a formal relationship with aviation — other than being an ass in a seat, of course — and the mind boggles as the curve arcs off the chart and into low earth orbit.
For every person who is an active participant in aviation of some form there are — I dunno — about a jillion who are interested in it. At least interested enough to pack the spouse and kids into the Vista Cruiser, head to the local aerodrome, stand on baking hot concrete for hours in the blazing sun for simply the possibility of seeing some spicy banking and yanking.
Such is the magical, mystical and age-old attraction for things that fly.
The other characteristic of aviation and in particular those who enthuse about it: generally speaking, they are a very inclusive and non-judgemental bunch united by seemingly nothing more than the desire to look up. A professional pilot with 20,000 hours of flight time who sees a kid at the park with their first radio-controlled glider is quite likely to pull over and watch for a while. Things that fly are just — well — cool.
In addition, this spectator pro pilot knows there is a continuous fibre which connects the stick-and-tissue efforts in the park with what they have done for their entire professional life. The same basic principles apply. Learn them as a kid and know them for life. If that life includes being pilot-in-command at some point, a model airplane as a kid is a pretty good place to start.
Cast a Wide Net
The lesson learned, of course, is to introduce as few arbitrary limitations to the publication’s audience as possible. None, hopefully.
Here’s some good news: if it’s hard to move conversion factor ³ upward, it’s relatively easy to move the needle with respect to audience size when it comes to aviation in the broadest sense. If the audience for radio-controlled gliders is too small, simply drop the ‘radio-controlled’ part and include any sort of glider. Instantaneously, the potential audience is vastly increased.
Taking this notion to its logical extreme, why not cater to everything from a passing interest through to a healthy obsession with anything made by humans found flying somewhere between the surface of the earth and the Kármán Line?
That ought to do, at least for now.
Then Teach People to Fish
In pursuit of that much much broader audience, an unintended consequence will quickly rear its head: the tiny tributaries which reflect the many facets and nuances of aviation interest will quickly consolidate into a raging cataract of information. It has the potential to be difficult to navigate and easily overwhelming.
There will be unapologetic enthusiasts with tons of time on their hands who will surf through the infotainment rapids on a stand-up paddle board. Based on the empirical evidence collected during the New RCSD’s run, however, they are likely to be the rare exception.
Most will want quieter, more navigable waters for their tiny Sabot of interest. One where the content is more focused on their particular inclinations. Potentially worse yet, the Paradox of Choice ⁴ dictates that when there are many choices of what to consume, many will simply choose not to consume at all.
A great example of this is back in the early days of social media. The unprecedented and unpredicted growth of social platforms meant feeds were quickly overwhelmed by the shear number of posts. Reading, let alone thinking about and responding to everything was just not an option.
The ad hoc, thrown together answer back then was to hastily introduce the now ubiquitous, half-baked and distinctly mixed blessing that is the modern hashtag: that is, including a defined character — the #️⃣ of course — followed by other characters of the poster’s sole discretion. The initial, noble objective was intended to enable grouping of posts on the same topic and filter out the bycatch before it gets anywhere near the net. At least at a conceptual level, not a bad idea at all.
Chumming
Hashtags were introduced with only the slightest patina of discipline. In fact, no discipline at all. They could be created — or, just as often, miscreated — at will. This inevitably made them pretty useless. Clicking on a hashtag to find related posts often results in unpredictable results. Yes it was possible there would be more posts on the subject of interest. But seemingly as likely were posts by sharks — hip to the smell of blood in the water — intent on chomping down on and shredding our attention by hijacking the hashtag for some nefarious purpose.
Furthermore, don’t get me started about those who think they can game the system by creating posts which seemingly consist of nothing but hashtags. Don’t they realise it’s programming child’s play to send any post with more than, say, three hashtags to the nether regions of search results never to be seen again?
A better idea, back then, would have been to nail down a fixed list of tags prior to their introduction. No making them up on the fly — simply select one from an ‘approved’ list. Yeah, right. Unless you’ve been under a rock which is in turn under ten feet of water in a galaxy far far away, it’s impossible not to know this is not the way things are done on the ‘modern’ internet:
“I’ll use whatever hashtags I want and as many as I want and I’ll be damned if you’re going to tell me otherwise!”
To which I respond “go for it.” However, you’re totally missing the point. Hashtags only make sense if they are held in common with the community they’re intended to serve. Agreeing on them is the whole danged idea. Furthermore, they should only evolve gradually over time and with thoughtful consideration when they do. Melvil Dewey — and his weirdo Decimal System ⁵ — was actually onto something.
A Modest Proposal
If working within a clearly defined domain — like aviation, as it turns out — it’s pretty easy to identify the predictable areas of interest and tag them in some simple way. Sort of like hashtags, I suppose, but ‘done right’ this time.
There is an almost infinitely valuable return for using this seemingly draconian approach: it enables the damming up of the information torrent resulting in predictable, healthy and moderate flows of what’s actually wanted at any given time. Tweak it, at will, over time to increase or decrease the flow or change the kinds of posts which make up your particular feed.
Hmm, interesting. Let me get back to you on that in a bit. 🛩️
April 15th, 2024
¹ This excellent photograph — and more like them — can be found in a 2019 piece by the New Zealand Defence Force entitled NZDF and MPI Crayfish Patrols Find High Level of Compliance. It’s well worth reading.
² From the International Council of Air Shows website page entitled About Air Shows. It goes on to describe air show audiences as a: « well-educated, affluent group of men, women and children of all ages. More than 70 percent of the audience at an air show has had some college education. Three quarters report household income of $35,000 or more. The average adult spectator is just under 39 years of age ».
³ This topic is covered in more detail in Part II of this series, in the section entitled All Points Bulletin: Our Conversion Factor is Missing.
⁴ The classic book The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz describes: « how an abundance of options ultimately makes us miserable … it is infinitely harder to make a decision when you have more options to choose from. »
⁵ While Melvil Dewey — the man — had a distinctly chequered history, there’s no debating the impact his eponymous Decimal System had on information classification and the field of librarianship.
This article was originally published on BluFly. It is the third part of a multi-part series which deconstructs the demise of the New RC Soaring Digest and the basis that formed for the eventual launch of BluFly Media. Go back to the previous part or, if you prefer, go right back to the beginning with Part I. Do you have any thoughts you’d like to share? We’d love to hear from you. To be alerted to the publication of the next part, see our Bluesky Custom Feed. You can also find us on Threads and Instagram.
