National Rugby League on DeadJournal and JournalFen
This post is a series of posts looking at the size of Australian sports leagues on LiveJournal and its clones. Two earlier posts were Australian Football League on JournalFen and Australian Football League community on DeadJournal. These posts acknowledge that the communities aren’t very big and in the grand scheme of things, this is not very meaningful in terms of understanding sports communities in Australia.
Australia’s second major sports league is the National Rugby League. It is popular in different parts of the country than the Australian Football League., with more fans of and teams in the NRL hailing from Queensland than the AFL. In terms of LiveJournal clones, it is interesting to compare the two communities in terms of size and state location.
For the AFL, JournalFen has a total of four fans for the league and specific teams. The National Rugby League in comparison has zero fans who list it or specific teams as an interest on JournalFen. JournalFen also has no communities dedicated to the league or a team. This particular LiveJournal clone has always catered a bit more towards media fandom and it has a small community, with only 85 accounts having posted an entry in the last 24 hours.
The community on DeadJournal for the NRL is larger than the one on JournalFen. The general interest in the league, expressed by listing NRL as an interest, was smaller than that of the AFL on DeadJournal; 5 people versus 13 people.
Of the five people who list the NRL as an interest, three list a year of birth or make it easy to determine, based on their profile description, their year of birth. The years were 1987, 1988, 1989. Four of the five listed the state they lived in: Three live in New South Wales and one in Queensland. None of these accounts have been updated recently. The most recent was 188 weeks, or a little over 3 and a half years ago.
There are a several fans for specific NRL teams on DeadJournal. This small community of six people is twice the size of the team specific interest for the AFL. The most popular team on DeadJournal is the Newcastle Knights, with four people listing the team as an interest. Newcastle Knights fans list their years of birth as: 1986,1986, and 1987. One person does not list a year of birth. Three people list their state of residence: Two are from New South Wales and one is from Queensland. These fans haven’t updated recently with the most recent update 265 weeks ago. Two other teams have people listing them as an interest: The Melbourne Storm and the South Sydney Rabbitohs. Both these teams have one person listing them as an interest. The Melbourne Storm is from Victoria, was born in 1987 and last updated 203 weeks ago. The South Sydney Rabbitohs fan does not list a year of birth or state of residence; they last updated 388 weeks ago.
The NRL community on both JournalFen and DeadJournal is smaller than that of the AFL. The small NRL community is based more in New South Wales than the AFL community on both services. They are inactive and probably not relevant in any grand scheme of thing for determining the size and shape of both leagues online communities.