PETE SPOKE!!! (AND WE RECORDED IT)

[johndiver999]

I

Think of when you travel to a different city. You land at the airport and do you go to the nearest car deal and BUY a new car because you need to drive around for a few days? Or do you go to a car rental place and RENT a car? Same general principle can be applied to the dive industry.

Except.. I can rent a 30 or $40,000 car for a day at the same price as some used dive gear that cost the shop $1500 (when new). Always thought that was interesting.

 

[Ken Kurtis]

Assuming there's some correlation between web traffic and sales, here are the worldwide rankings from alexa.com as of today (to be clear, the site doesn't give actual traffic number,s just relative rankings):
Leisurepro - 100,579
Divers Direct - 214,740
Scuba.com - 230,284
Dive Right In - 253,183
Dive Gear Express - 256,440
Scuba Toys - 959,208
Reef Seekers Dive Co. - 2,743,223 (but we don't do on-line sales - just listed this as a humbling reference)

For perspective:
Google - 1
FaceBook - 7
Amazon - 11
ESPN - 103
CNN - 108
NY Times - 116
Worldometers.info (COVID data) - 349
MLB.com - 401
NY Post - 486
The White House - 8,453
DEMA - 1,330,069

 

[DiveGearExpress]

Assuming there's some correlation between web traffic and sales, here are the worldwide rankings from alexa.com as of today (to be clear, the site doesn't give actual traffic number,s just relative rankings):
Leisurepro - 100,579
Divers Direct - 214,740
Scuba.com - 230,284
Dive Right In - 253,183
Dive Gear Express - 256,440
Scuba Toys - 959,208
Reef Seekers Dive Co. - 2,743,223 (but we don't do on-line sales - just listed this as a humbling reference)

For perspective:
Google - 1
FaceBook - 7
Amazon - 11
ESPN - 103
CNN - 108
NY Times - 116
Worldometers.info (COVID data) - 349
MLB.com - 401
NY Post - 486
The White House - 8,453
DEMA - 1,330,069

These numbers aren't particularly reliable. For example, divegearexpress.com is hosted behind Cloudflare CDN and DNS. Last year we enabled in CF extensive IP filters, server and DNS blocks for certain types of traffic in the pipes to stop all traffic from certain locations (Russia, Ukraine, North Korea via China) because it was essentially entirely malicious and/or useless (badiu, yandex, and other "bad bots"). Noise that literally accounted for 90% of our total inbound traffic on most days and during particularly persistent attacks as much as 99% of our traffic before Cloudflare was enabled.

Notice the diving related ecommerce websites are clustered together; we can say with some confidence that whitehouse.gov ranks higher than dema.org, or perhaps leisurepro ranks higher than reef seekers dive but the rest is mostly noise. To say that diversdirect.com has roughly similar amounts of traffic to divegearexpress.com is not particularly meaningful, and in this case not even accurate. In the case of sites with large marketing budgets, they can use keywords that generate a lot of click traffic to their website but you don't know what their bounce rate is, nor do you have any idea what their conversion rate is. Because there are wildly varying conversion rates among e-commerce sites, traffic has very little correlation between sales. DGX spends relatively very little on keyword marketing (i.e. google adwords et. al.), blocks useless traffic, and has a lot of good organics, thus has a phenomenally high conversion rate. Further, most of the good dive industry specific ecommerce sites also have a thriving "local dive shop" business and difficult to say what percentage of the website traffic translates to in-store local sales volume. I have a strong suspicion that the largest single dive equipment ecommerce retailer on the planet is Amazon, probably at least 10% of the entire scuba market, yet with shockingly low profit margins for most sellers.

For some analysis of the scuba market that might be meaningful... see this... Scuba Diving Market Data & Statistics – Scubanomics – Medium

 

[The Chairman]

Really, if you want to advertise to divers who BUY, please send me a DM. We have the divers you're looking for.

 

[PBcatfish]

Precisely on point.

So what would 'speak to' a potential new diver? Arrogant elitism is unlikely to work.

Unfortunately, arrogant elitism has a strong presence in the industry, from the shop workers, to the deck hands, to the customers. I very much like diving. I am less fond of the attitudes that I often find when trying to purchase things.

 

[SaltyCracker]

I think the problem - and I've said this for years - is that we have a fatal flaw in the construct of the industry.
• Why do people want to get certified? So they can dive.
• So they have to go to a dive shop (or independent instructor) to get certified.
• Does the dive shop, post-class, then take them diving? No.
• The dive shop tries all they can to sell them more gear (beyond basic) and more classes.
• Did anyone reading this get certified because they wanted the privilege of buying gear or the ability to take more classes? IMHO, no.
• They got certified because they want to go dive and see things.
• Now ask yourselves how many dive shops really focus on taking people diving instead of selling them gear and more classes.
• And that, to me, is the problem with the industry.
• As a whole, we spend our efforts trying to get people we just certified to buy gear and classes.
• When they don't, we then recruit a new group to certify in hopes of selling THEM more gear and classes.
• And because we're too busy organizing the next class, we don't have time to satisfy the desire we helped create in them.
• Essentially, we create new customers and then fail at fulfilling the reason they came to us in the first place.
• And that's the essential problem with the business model of the dive industry. We simply don't give the people what they want so we have to constantly re-invent our customer base which doesn't leave us time to give the customers what they want.

This thread prompted me to look up your website. I'm impressed with what you're doing.

 

[Jake 10]

Thank you Ken for the link. I finally got to see the recording and really enjoy it.

 

[tallship]

All this jibberish about Web 2, Web 3, Metaverse, etc., and the relatively worthless utility that the monolithic silos of social networking continue to provide as a service, as they continue to subjugate their audience.

It's very refreshing to see that the actual notions of community and topic are alive and well here at SCUBAboard, under the capable custodianship of the management here that understands the importance of cultivating this very important aspect of culture and social engagement.

I enjoyed the stream very much, and hearing a lot of names that I hadn't for quite some time.