I’m planning a series of posts on summer sports and activities (and related keywords etc) to help with your shoot planning.

While doing some background research I came across a couple of very interesting data repositories at the Census & The National Association of Sporting Goods Manufacturers.

I was playing around with the data for consumer spending and participation and decided to run a quick analysis on the average spending per participant for each of the Top 5. The data blew me away.

Top 5 Recreational Pursuits by Spending

Top Sports/Activities by Spending

NB: Spending & Participation Data in Millions; Source: NSGA

The Fastest Growing of the Top 5? Hunting…

Top Recreational Activities by Consumer Spending

Source: NSGA

Things That Surprised Me

To be honest, almost everything about the data above surprised me. I expected golf to top the total and per person spending charts and I definitely didn’t expect hunting to be on this chart in the first place.

Based on my surprise around hunting & golf, I decided to do a quick search on iStock & Getty Images to see how many results showed up for stock imagery around these subjects. I expected more golf than hunting shots all around.

At iStock, there were 16,576 images returned for a search for ‘golf’ and 6,806 images returned for a search on ‘hunting’. So far so good. I expected to see the same thing at Getty but it was not to be. Getty returns 10,291 results for golf and 12,990 results for hunting. I’m not really sure how to explain the fact that there are more hunting images at Getty but if you have some ideas, please share them in the comments.

Conclusions & Observations

I’m going to have to add hunting to the list of activities that I profile over the next few weeks!

If you believe that how much someone is willing to spend on something is a proxy for how much a marketer will spend to sell them that something, then hunting is clearly an important activity to study.

A Small Request

If you’ve read this far and you found this post interesting, please tweet about it, follow us on twitter, or leave a comment on our blog. In return, I will contact you to get your vote on which activities you’d like to see us profile in our sports/leisure series.

If you help us share our content, the least we can do is make sure we listen when figuring out what to write about next. (Of course, if you just write to me, I will listen anyway, but that is neither here nor there.)

Thanks for reading this far.