I must admit that it’s difficult to come up with things to write about when it comes to airsoft. Being new to this blogging thing, I still suffer from writers block and other problems that new writers have. However a unique problem with airsoft is that there’s far too much emphasis on buying products. It appears like noone is interested in anything more than buying stuff.

Take a look at search results on google. I entered “airsoft” into google, and the first page is nothing more than retail sites(inb4 someone chimes in “but what about the wikipedia article?”). The first non retail/field website that I’ve found is this. It’s towards the very end of the third page of search results, and you’re not getting any traffic there.

You would think that this site, being the first non retail site would have people in it talking about the more important things in airsoft like actually playing airsoft. Not a chance, at least two thirds of the content on the front page are ads, or ads that are euphemistically called “reviews”. The “forum” is filled with talk about buying this or selling that.

This chronic level of advertising can’t be good for the future of the sport. Compare this to soccer (or as you non-Americans call it, “football”), where the first retail site is from Nike, towards the end of the second page. The first page contains news about recent games that were played and local organizations that revolve around soccer.

You don’t find three pages of search results for sites that sell shit. You won’t find forums dedicated to discussing which brands of soccer balls are best, or how Chinese brand A’s soccer balls are stitched together far better than Chinese brand B’s. The news sites, local associations, and forums about soccer talk about what they do (i.e. playing soccer) rather than what they buy.

Compare the size of soccer, both in the number of players and the industry’s size, to airsoft. The reason soccer and other sports are more popular is because people primarily play these sports or talk about professionals who do, rather than talking about the newest ‘look what I bought’. Flooding the sport with ads will shunt its growth, and airsoft needs to grow as much as possible now before it gets banned. The short term gains from all of this advertising is not going to offset the loss of business when the sport is banned entirely.

Now with 100% more hypocrisy!

What’s a better place to advertise than in a blog post that bashes advertising? I’ve recently started participating in the Amazon Affiliate program to show what products I use. Here’s some stuff I use for airsoft (there isn’t that much), take a look!