How Did You Become Aware of the 2025 Survey?

For Wargames, Soldiers, and Strategy's Great Wargaming Survey (GWS) in 2024 and 2025, the drop-off in responses was significant.  When asked what have contributed to these results, I often hear that gamers did not see any promotion of the 2025 GWS and missed filling it in.  Now, there are likely other forces at play, but I was curious where gamers actually saw a GWS promotion.  To get some data on the topic, a question was added in 2025 to examine the reach of GWS promotions.

While the question allowed free text responses, a standard pick list was available too.  Now, a number of respondents opted for free text entry even when one of the standard choices was a suitable option.  To aggregate as many of the responses as possible, responses were parsed and recategorized into one of the existing standard responses.  One respondent even wrote in that "he saw it on Jon's blog!"  That person gets a Gold Star from me.  When all of the responses were recoded and tallied, the distribution of responses show that the top four media sources were:

1. Wargaming website (17.1%)
2. Facebook (15.9%)
3. YouTube (12.3%)
4. WSS (12.2%)

Almost 60% of respondents saw the survey promo in one of these top four sources.

Interesting distribution and, perhaps, a reasonable gauge on where gamers consume hobby information.  While many of these sources are somewhat foreign to me, clearly this is not the case for the larger survey population.  Given my lack of familiarity with some of these media sources, I decided to examine these media distributions by Age Group.  Could my age group offer insight and help explain why there are large, missing chunks in my media exposure?  It is not me, it’s my age.

What stands out from the graph above is that media source tends to be age driven.  It could be my age!  The younger age cohorts predominately rely on YouTube for finding survey promos.  As age increases, respondents tend to increasingly turn to Wargaming websites and WSS.  Probably no surprise here but, perhaps, something to consider for marketing.

What if these data are cross-tabulated by Primary Interest rather than by Age Group?  Will a different picture emerge? 

While not surprising that respondents having Historical (16.2%) and Mixed (12.3%) primary interests see promos in WSS, Fantasy/Sci-Fi (2.7%) barely produces a signal.  For the Fantasy/Sci-Fi group, Friends (9.1%) and Discord (15.4%) are outsized drivers compared to the Historical/Mixed groups.  Hmm.  Why do primarily non-historical gamers rely on word-of-mouth from friends more than the other two groups?

These results suggest that one must know and tap into each audience's preferred media to pinpoint the promo campaign that targets any particular audience.

Where did you see the promo?