but as this "base" appears to be around 5.5% of the potential target audience wouldn't this then suggest otherwise, surely if the mags were engaging the interest of their target audience then more than 5.5% of it would be reading them.
I'm afraid you're hoist upon your own petard, sir!
The vast majority of anglers fish with poles on commercial fisheries followed by those who fish for carp. This is what most successful magazines feature...
Golf is a far more affluent market compared with fishing. Nor is it splintered into seperate factions. Golf is round balls, 18 holes and a set of clubs. Angling is many disciplines, some so far removed from each other as to be completely different pastimes. Drey fley, old boy?
At the risk of generalising, those who criticise the status quo tend to be look down their noses at commercial fisheries, match anglers, 'serious' carpers, etc. They are in a narrow minority who yearn for the days of Mr Crabtree while claiming to be forward thinking.
There are a couple of outstanding free magazines online featuring the finest photography around. It's not as if aspirational media doesn't exist. However, there is not a great market for this stuff in the UK and once again I cite Waterlog as there is no other publication within the genre.
I ask you again, who will write this mythical magazine, where will the groundbreaking and revolutionary fresh content come from and who will bankroll it? The only model that is being championed (Waterlog) is not only guilty of the very crime current magazines commit - regurgitation of ideas - it positively thrives on it. Rather than leading us into the next millennium it seeks to take us back into the last one.
And the circulation is tiny.
We should never forget that coarse angling is regarded as a working class, blue collar sport. It is not even on the advertising agencies radar. Leading publications in other sports carry adverts for products that have no relation to the sport, only to the (affluent) readership.
We all need cars to go fishing but no motoring manufacturer is going to target the angling market. Were probably regarded as vans and banger merchants.
Anglers in general are too 'cheap' to shell out £5 on a decent magazine, too cheap to join the Angling Trust, too ready to buy knock-off gear and shoddy foreign imports. I could go on, but what's the point?
If you had a million pounds to squander on a whim would you invest in a golf, a tennis, a football or a fishing magazine?
Case rests milud...