That time is upon us when we wind things down at AAHQ and reflect on the past twelve months, and what lies ahead for the AA CREW in the year ahead, a whole new year of airsoft adventures to be embraced, experienced, enjoyed, and reported on!
In what we hope will be a tradition that will endure each and every year as we approach Christmas and the year-end, we like to bring you up to date with our progress, peeling back every layer of the “AA Onion” to reveal what’s been a success for us, and where there may be challenges for the future.
2023 has been a stunning year for AIRSOFT ACTION again and we’ve continued to add crucial layers to what we do, and this has resulted in our nomination yet again in TWO categories for the annual Players Choice Awards, those of “Best Airsoft Magazine (Print or Digital)” and the “Best English Language Airsoft News Website”; of course we’re very proud and genuinely humbled to be in this position again, and thank you all for your confidence in us, and your obvious enjoyment for the content we produce; thank you so much to all of you that have voted for us so far… keep those votes coming!
Since our move to a free-to-read, digital-only format AIRSOFT ACTION has continued to grow and flourish, and both RED CELL and The AA LEGION have matured into entities with their own identity and importance, and are very much a part of our “daily business”; these will continue to grow even further in 2024!
As we said last year, our in-house remit is to become the friendliest, most widely-read, internationally-recognisable and trusted airsoft information source and we continue to move forward as we land articles and reports from all over the world from a broad range of experienced, knowledgeable and highly-valued contributors; this too will continue next year as our geographic reach grows again. During 2023 we’ve had reports from many, many countries, and the AA CREW have traveled to shows, games and events in the USA, throughout Europe, and more recently to “Airsoft Central”, Taiwan itself.
However, online content-creation is apparently accelerating as never before… but is it really, and is all content good content? With social media platforms clamping down on anything even vaguely “firearm related” including realistic airsoft replicas these channels of information sharing and dissemination are increasingly unstable as long-term communication tools within our ever-growing community.
This year at AIRSOFT ACTION we have already taken steps and reinvested to ensure that our content can be delivered consistently, and is future-proofed, as our web platform and the portfolio of online publishing platforms we choose to work with has been created with great care, and everything is managed solely in-house.
Because we solely manage our main daily news and monthly magazine output we can offer proven, reliable continuity. AIRSOFT ACTION is entering YEAR 13 of uninterrupted publication, and every bit of content we have ever created is still available in the BACK ISSUES SECTION here on the website, and is STILL providing you with an invaluable airsoft resource as our analytics show; you obviously like to dip into our older content, and you can be sure it will ALWAYS be available freely to you!
Will AIRSOFT ACTION continue to use social media as a part of our content-sharing strategy though? As long as the medium is available to us we, like you, will continue to use social media platforms to disseminate our own content and share that of trusted partners; it would be mad not to! However, our social media output will be just one single part of a wider, more detailed, insightful and comprehensive strategy, not the only element!
With that in mind, it has been a challenging year for AIRSOFT ACTION; as we are, in truth reliant on our fabulous industry partners to support our FREE TO READ status via their advertising within our pages and on our website we too have been at the mercy of a volatile global economy, and as our industry partners have clawed their way back from the financial ravages of the pandemic, so too have we! We finish the year in a healthier place than this time in 2022, and that means we will be able to reinvest more into AIRSOFT ACTION, and especially into our valued contribution team and their consistently outstanding content!
None of this of course is possible without strong and trusted industry relationships; we tell it like it is, and both all of you and our industry partners trust us to do so, and to provide detailed feedback… even when it’s not positive! But unlike others we prefer to talk about what is good, what works, and not grab a headline via spurious, negative “click-bait” means. So, as always we’d like to express a huge and sincere THANK YOU to all of our airsoft industry partners who have supported us SO well again this year; your support and friendship is very highly valued and we look forward to working closely with you all going forward, and to those that have become partners with us more recently… welcome aboard!
And it really has been a successful year for AIRSOFT ACTION! Readership continues to grow steadily and sustainably, and our roots in the player community means that we talk to you as fellow techs, shooters and players ourselves, which we believe is fundamentally vital.
As we head towards a new year, MOA has come and gone once again and showed us many exciting new airsoft directions; we’ll be covering SHOT SHOW ’24 too, as well as heading on out to Germany for IWA ’24 so you can rest assured that we’ll have all the very latest things to report on as we move into the next twelve months, whilst still maintaining our successful long-term testing programs too.
All of the AA CREW would like to say another huge THANK YOU to all of the many, many thousands of you that continue to read and follow what we have to say, along with wishing all of you around the big wide world of airsoft a very HAPPY CHRISTMAS if you celebrate it, or just HAPPY HOLIDAYS if you don’t!
AAHQ will be shut from lunchtime today until the New Year, but rest assured we’re already working on ISSUE 158 for January when we’ll strive to continue to offer you, our fellow airsofters, the very best unbiased, insightful and entertaining event coverage and airsoft content that we possibly can! We’ll wrap things up now by saying (as we do most Fridays!) that if you’re playing a special Christmas game this weekend, or you’re seeing in the New Year slinging BBs then Play hard, Play safe, and Play with Honour!
