LF,

I was careful to use the word "avid" in my estimate of "best estimates." One of the federally funded studies done a few years ago was a mail-in survey that asked how often and by what means people fished as part of the survey questions. It concluded there were about 13 million Americans who had ever fly fished. Of those, about 6 million fly fished at least once in the past year. The study group considered them "fly anglers." I don't. Many of them most likely had just tried it for the first time. Many more probably only fly fish once every so many years. If I take a ride in a hot air balloon on vacation, does that make me a balloonist? About 3 million fly fished more than once in the course of the previous year. And about 2 million said they fly fished more than 6 times. I would consider those who fly fished more than once to be mostly casual fly anglers and those who fished more than 6 times "avid" fly anglers. The latter would be the only group likely to buy fly fishing videos. This is actually marketing demographics 101 stuff. But folks in the fly fishing industry aren't very hip on this stuff. It's actually odd. With my background in the hunting business and as head of ad sales for Outdoors Yellow Pages, I've had these types of discussions with a lot of folks across the hook & bullet industry. A lot of the other sectors are far more tuned in and market savvy on average. I'm usually impressed by relatively few senior execs in our industry, where the dominant strategy is a very myopic, "That's the way we've always done it."