Ozzie Sport

The Melbourne Storm are a member of the National Rugby League, having joined in 1998.  This post will look at the size and location of Melbourne Storm the community on LiveJournal and its clones.

LiveJournal is the most popular service, easily beating out all the clones with 25 people listing the team as an interest.  (There are no communities dedicated to the team though.)   Dreamwidth is the second most popular service with two users.  Blurty and DeadJournal come in third with one user each.   There are no fans on InsaneJournal, Inksome or JournalFen.  CrazyLife appears to be down so no numbers can be found there.

For this community, the blurty and DeadJournal fans are not active on the service: Neither have updated in the past 200 plus weeks.  On Dreamwidth, one updated in the last week and one last updated 34 weeks ago.  On LiveJournal, seven updated in the past week, seven have updated in the past six months, ten haven’t updated in the past year and a half and one has never updated.

When combined, eleven of the twenty-nine users have listed their year of birth.   The average year of birth was 1984.45, with a median and mode year of birth at 1985.  Twenty-six of the twenty-nine list their country of residence.  Unsurprisingly, all are from Australia. Thirteen are from Victoria, seven are from New South Wales and three are from Queensland.

From LiveJournal and its clones, I’ve collected data on the distribution of fans of the Melbourne Storm,  Brisbane Broncos, Balmain Tigers (defunct), Cronulla Sharks, North Sydney Bears (defunct), and St. George Dragons (defunct) based on listing of the team as an interest.  The following chart shows the comparative distribution of fans of the aforementioned teams on LiveJournal and its clones.  It might be a bit hard to tell from this chart but Queensland has 25 people total, New South Wales has 20, Victoria has 15 and the ACT has 7.

The Storm dominate in their home state of Victoria. They take a majority in New South Wales but are largely absent from the ACT.  This is some what surprising as the Storm are supposed to be the second most popular team in the league and the ACT is a melting pot of people from all the other states.

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• Socceroos: A creative research data dump (part 3)

The ANZ Championship replaced the Commonwealth Bank Trophy as the premiere netball championship in 2008. There are ten teams in the competition, five from Australia and five from New Zealand.  They are:

• Adelaide Thunderbirds

• Melbourne Vixens

• New South Wales Swifts

• Queensland Firebirds

• West Coast Fever

• Canterbury Tactix

• Central Pulse

• Northern Mystics

• Southern Steel

• Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic

With the exception of the Melbourne Vixens, no one lists these teams as an interest on Facebook.  The New Zealand based teams also lack a fan base inside New Zealand’s Facebook community. The Melbourne Vixens have 840 people listing them as an interest on Facebook.  I’ve looked at some of the segmentation of this audience and generated the following data which can give you a better idea of the fanbase for this netball team that actually has a fanbase on Facebook, as determined by people listing them as an interest.

One of the things that surprised me in this little data set is that for fans aged 40 to 49, most of the fans are male.  I’m not sure why this is.  Female fans of the team also look to be overwhelming heterosexual.  For a female sports team, this does surprise me a bit as I would have thought that the percentage would have been a little higher.  The fanbase also appears to be a bit older: High school athletes do not appear as interested in the team, which suggests interest in the team may develop as fans get older and are less likely to participate in the sport themselves.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• ANZ Championship on Facebook’s fanpages and groups
• ANZ Championship fandom location on LiveJournal, bebo and blogger
• eBay.com.au and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport

The Commonwealth Bank Trophy is the premiere competition in Australia for women’s netball.  The competition has ten teams.  They are:

• Adelaide Thunderbirds

• AIS Canberra Darters

• Hunter Jaegers

• Melbourne Kestrels

• Melbourne Phoenix

• Perth Orioles

• Queensland Firebirds

• Sydney Swifts

Given the popularity netball for women in Australia, with 389,400 women having participated in 2002, I would have suspected some interest in the premiere competition on Facebook.  Yet according to Facebook’s Advertising targeting, no one is interested in any of those teams.  This with 60,200 people interested in netball by Australians on Facebook.   Most of the fans are female: 53,920 or 89.5%.  Interest in Australia’s national netball team is at 1,580 with 1,360 being female.  This interest in the sport and in the national team just is not translating into interest in teams in the major competition.

Edited to add: My bad.  This competition came to an end in 2007.  While Facebook has some fans in defunct teams, two years later it isn’t that surprising that there are not people interested in these teams as Facebook penetration is Australia is slower than it was in the United States, where people may have listed interests years ago and never got around to updating them.

Related Posts:

• Facebook groups and fanpages redux
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• ANZ Championship on Facebook’s fanpages and groups

This is less a blog post and more almost a note to myself.  I was looking at the size of defunct National Rugby League teams on LiveJournal, its clones and Facebook.  One team I am looking at now is Cumberland.   This particular team lasted only eight games in the league that predated the National Rugby League.  Nonetheless, I checked them out because sometimes you get people who are less sports fans passionate about their teams performance now; you get people who love the history of older teams and the game in an earlier era.  In the United States (which is admittedly not Australia), there are people who love teams from the Negro League and All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.  Thus, it is conceivable that you might get people fan of a team like Cumberland.

I checked out all the LiveJournal clones to see if anyone listed Cumberland as an interest.  Nope.  None.  I checked Facebook.  Facebook says that there are less than 20 fans of Cumberland from Australia.  That makes sense.  The North Sydney Bears and the Balmain Tigers have people interested in them on Facebook.  (But not the Glebe Dirty Reds, Newtown Jets, Western Suburbs Magpies.)  Then I checked LiveJournal.  LiveJournal has 42 people who list Cumberland as an interest.  This number is not accurate.  A quick look at some of the people confirms it as Cumberland is a city in Pennsylvania and Iowa and Indiana and Main, in England, and in Canada.  It also is a well known CTA stop on Chicago’s El.  The number for LiveJournal thus goes down as a zero, despite the fact that it doesn’t quite line up with the actual total.

Edited to add: This also applies for University, a team active from 1920-1937 .

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Gold Coast Titans on bebo
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy