Interview about IA
- This topic has 4 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated Feb 9, 2015 at 11:40 am by
.
-
Posts
-
I was asked for an interview by the British e-magazine Eat, Sleep, Fish. They have a nice site going and it was fun to kind of take a step back and analyze The Itinerant Angler and where it has gone these last ten years.
http://eat-sleep-fish.co.uk/content/2015/02/itinerant-angler
Ten years y’all! Our anniversary is April 10, 2015 (the day before my wedding, incidentally).
Zach
Hey Zach,
Many thanks for taking the time to speak to us and for the great answers too.
Many congrats in advance for April 10th it is a special date for me as it is my birthday too.
Good luck with the wedding and please keep up the great work with the podcasts, we love em in the UK too.
Pete
Nice interview Zach. I picked up on one comment you made relative to the future of websites like IA. I’ve noticed traffic on all of the website forums I frequent has been down. A lot of the decline has been attributed to Facebook and, more recently, twitter. I’m not on either one, so I’m probably missing out on a lot. Do Facebook and twitter have more limited groups? Brenda is on Facebook, but it seems she has to wade through about ten tons of BS to find anything of interest. How do you think this is going to affect the future of forums like yours?
Bob I just think people have a limited amount of time in the day for all forms of social media.
Eventually I see Facebook declining in popularity, because in order to monetize they have had to degrade the experience of seeing friends’ posts. People also hit critical mass in the friend groups years ago and for the most part the sensation of catching up with old acquaintances has died off. Now there are just real life friends and Facebook friends, and that initial sense of discovery I think is gone.
Will they come back to forums like this one? Likely not in the numbers we saw in 2005-2007, which in retrospect was the heyday of specialty forums on the internet. But will these forums ever totally die off? No, not as long as there is interest in a specialty event.
I also think to some extent it has to do with the quality of the experience. People were posting a lot when the economy was cranking in the mid-2000s. The forum decline has coincided with economic decline. I don’t think people were getting to fish as much. With gas prices low and hiring picking up I think we may see a bit of a burst this year — and I bet the fly shops are looking forward to that.
Zach
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.