Ozzie Sport

This post continues to look at the historical activity level of AFL fans on Yahoo!Groups.  This time, the focus is on the North Melbourne Kangaroos.

If you look at the North Melbourne Kangaroos category on Yahoo!Groups, you will find ten groups.  Of these, six of these are actually dedicated to the team.  They are northmelbournekangaroos, themightyrooboys, nmfc, mightyrooboys, northkangaroosclub and thenorthmelbournefc.  With the exception of themightyrooboys which was created in 1999, all the lists were created in 2000.  The average total membership membership is 24.  The lists all have open membership and have an ongoing spam problem.

I looked at the lists to determine when these lists had legitimate posting, added up the monthly totals across all six lists and generated the following chart:

The community was at its most active when it started.  There were two small season drops during the off season with the community all but disappearing after the 2002 campaign.  This some what resembles the pattern for the Essendon Bombers, though that community had more overall activity and a more extreme drop off in posting.  It looks like this particular service was never embraced by fans of the team as one of their early means of communicating.

In order to find out legitimate posting periods for nmfc, I had to join the list.  The list has 35 members at the moment. On topic posts to the list ended in January 2002.  Spam posting started in August 2004.  I decided to get membership demographics for the list since membership gave me access to a member list.  Of the 35 members, only one listed their age or gender (57, female) and no one listed their location.  (She joined during a period of legitimate posting.) Of the 35 members, thirteen or 37% joined during the period of legitimate posting.  Four members or 11% joined in the period where there was no posting.  Eighteen members or 51% joined during the period of only spam posting.  That’s a big problem for any sort of attempts to revive the list.  It is also a big problem for Yahoo!Groups and could explain why people who love mailing lists eschew their service.  It also makes it hard to legitimately get demographic data off the service, unless the assumption is made that all people joining after the period of spam content are actually spammers and their demographic data can be ignored.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• The AFL on Yahoo!Groups
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

When I was compiling the list of Twitter accounts for the ANZ Championship, I found several Australian netball team Twitter related accounts, including ones for Australian Diamonds, Petersham RUFC Netball Club, ACE Netball Club, Orcas Netball.  I got details regarding the total number of followers, checked totals on Facebook and compared these to the ANZ teams.  The following table was generated:

Australian Netball on Facebook and Twitter

For the smaller club teams that are more about participation, there just is not a Facebook interest in them.  This is not surprising as listing a team you participate in recreationally might seem odd; you’re not a fan but a player and the team isn’t professional or top level so it is unlikely others will want to find you as a result of your participation.  At least two of those teams have a Facebook presence to share news but this is not enough to get people to list these teams as an interest.

Beyond the clubs listed, there are some regional accounts for those interested in Australian netball.  They include @NetballAust – Netball Australia (72 followers), @Sydney_Netball – Sydney and New South Wales netball news from a newspaper (31 followers), and @netballvic – Netball Victoria (20 followers).

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

I’ve spent the past two hours or so culling through various netball related Twitter lists, checking lists that included ANZ Championship teams and players.  After having done that, it looks like five teams have a Twitter presence:  Adelaide Thunderbirds, Melbourne Vixens, New South Wales Swifts, Queensland Firebirds, and West Coast Fever.  For the Thunderbirds, there are two accounts: @AdelaideTBirds and @NatTbirds.  The first is a team account and the second is the personal account of a player.  The Vixens similarly have two accounts, one for the team and a player with a personal account: @MelbourneVixens and @SharelleVixens.  The same situation exists for the New South Wales Swifts: @nswswifts and @SusanSwifts.  For the Queensland Firebirds and West Coast Fever, single players have accounts but the teams do not appear to have an official Twitter presence: @laurafirebirds and @SusanWCFever.

For the team accounts, the Thunderbirds have 62 followers, the Vixens have 904 followers and the Swifts have 90 followers.  This puts the average at 352 followers per team because the 904 skews the numbers really high.  If that is excluded, the average is 76.  For player accounts, the average number of followers is 208.8.  The highest number is 400, for the Vixens player.  The lowest is 66 for the West Coast Fever player.  These numbers are comparable to several of the A-League related Twitter accounts.

Using Twitter Analyzer, the location of the followers of these accounts was determined and the following table was generated:

ANZ Championship on Twitter

The West Coast Fever (represented by their Tweeting player) had the smallest Australian audience and the Melbourne Vixens had the largest percentage Australian audience.  I still believe these numbers are questionably reliable, that people are lying about their location of that there is a huge problem with spam followers on Twitter.  Why?  The Melbourne Vixens have 9 followers from Greenland.   Googling for Greenland and Netball doesn’t bring up any information about sport in the country.  Given that, it doesn’t make sense that the Vixens would have that huge of a following from the country.

If you’re interested in following ANZ Championship teams and players on Twitter, I’ve created a Twitter list @ozziesport/anzchampionship.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)

I should probably stick to patterns with these posts, completing all the NRL or AFL teams for a network before switching another network, league or team.  I’m just not capable of doing that at the moment.  If you want to keep up with what I am doing data wise with specific leagues, teams and networks, I suggest you use the categories to find posts.  Category navigation can be found on the menu bar.  When you use your mouse to hover over a category, a menu should drop down with more options.

That out of the way, this post will look at the size of the Canterbury Bulldogs fan community on LiveJournal.   The Bulldogs are part of the National Rugby League and are based in Sydney.  (On LiveJournal clones like blurty, Dreamwidth Studios, InsaneJournal and JournalFen, no one lists Canterbury Bulldogs or Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs as an interest.  Therefor, it is impossible to talk about them.)  As of January 11, 2010, twenty-six people list the Canterbury Bulldogs as an interest.

Four of the twenty-six have updated in the last month.  Another five have updated in the last year.   One has never updated.  This lack of recent updating is a bit higher than the percentage wise than the Melbourne Storm community.

Twelve of the twenty-six list their year of birth.   The average year of birth is 1985, and the median and mode year of birth is 1987.  This puts their fanbase on LiveJournal at an average age of about a year younger than their counterpart fans who like the Melbourne Storm.

Twenty-one people list their country of residence.  Eighteen are from Australia, with one each from Jamaica, New Zealand and the United States.  85.7% are Australian.  The percentage of Australians is higher than Brisbance Broncos fans on bebo (71.1% Aussie), Brisbane Bronco fans on LiveJournal (81.1%), Brisbane Broncos fans on Twitter (67.6%).  It is lower than Brisbane Broncos fans on blogger (100%) and Dreamwidth (100%) and Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal (100%).

Of the eighteen Australians, sixteen of them list their state of residence: Fourteen from New South Wales, one from Queensland and one from Victoria.  When compared to the Brisbane Broncos, Balmain Tigers, Cronulla Sharks, Melbourne Storm, North Sydney Bears, and St. George Dragons fans on LiveJournal, this team draws most heavily from New South Wales.   The second most popular team in New South Wales on LiveJournal based on the aforementioned teams is the Melbourne Storm, with seven people from the state.

Related Posts:

• Melbourne Storm on LiveJournal and its clones
• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups

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:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia

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 (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

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
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

The following chart is based on the data gathered for posts to date.  It is intended to give a general idea as to the comparative size of various sports fandom communities to each other.  Blanks indicate that no data regarding that team on the service has been gathered; it does not indicate a size of zero for that particularly service.  If you would like specific data regarding a team on a service to understand where that number of coming from, please comment or e-mail me at laura[at]fanhistory[dot]com.  I am more than happy to explain it.

Leagues with teams at the bottom include AFL, AHL, A-League, Claxton Shield, Gridiron Australia Nationals, KFC Twenty20 Big Bash, NBL, Rugby League/State of Origin, Victorian Amateur Football Association.  The AFL’s expansion team puts one of their teams in the bottom 10.  Soccer teams, baseball teams, American/Gridiron football, basketball, netball, rugby union, ice hockey, rugby league and Australian rules football are at the bottom.  Some of these sports can be accounted for because of they are not popular sports in the country.  Others can be accounted for because the teams are part of secondary leagues and competitions.  It will be interesting to see how and if popularity shifts as more data is added from additional networks.

Edited to add: This post mostly came about as I needed to take a break from gathering Yahoo!Groups data.  The directory currently is not working for me.  It limits my ability to data gather as a result.  Two of the big things in terms of moving a team up or down the above list are Facebook and Twitter.  Facebook has a lot of voids and that’s easy enough to fill in.  I did that.  Things at the bottom didn’t change much but things at the top really did change with four clubs above the 40,000 fans threshold.

Given the huge leaps there, I cannot really foresee the top order changing much, especially as the Twitter data is already there. The other social networks out there just do not have populations to provide an audience that size. Facebook claims that 7,680,420 people are from Australia on its service. When 50,000 list their interest as the Magpies or the Blues, well, that’s .6% of all Australians on Facebook. Or put another way, 3 out of every 500 Australians on the site list one of those two teams as an interest. For a sports team, that seems really high and about on par for the most popular sports team in other countries. (The New York Yankees have about 785,000 fans for an American population of about 101,468,000 on Facebook. That puts the percentage at about .7%.)

Yahoo!Groups doesn’t have a large population. While bebo is popular in Australia, it doesn’t provide numbers even close to this. The only way to get numbers that large are to find community specific sites which require registration.

More edited to add: One of the things I did not realize with the various data sets I’ve been compiling is that about a third of the teams in the National Rugby League aren’t included. My bad. Most of my focus has been on the AFL. Hence, the oversight. I’ve compiled that again and rather than update with a third image, just going to say that there have been no major shake ups. The Brisbane Broncos remain on thop. The St. George Dragons are at the bottom with 240 fans. Second to last are the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs with 1,580. No team really has the big number of fans that the AFL has.

More editing: I normally tried variations of a team’s name for Facebook to make sure I get the highest number.  In the case of St. George Illawarra Dragons, I goofed and got the one that listed 240.  When I used St Geoergillawarra Dragons combed with St. George Illawarra Dragons, I got 9,200.  This change will show up in any future data analysis.  The collection date has always been changed to today just so I know when I got that number.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)

This post is part of a series looking at the AFL fandom on Yahoo!Groups.  It focuses on providing general historical information about these groups: When they were founded and activity levels.  For a critique of the problems on Yahoo!Groups in getting demographic information, read Sydney Swans on Yahoo!Groups and The AFL on Yahoo!Groups.

This post is about the Yahoo!Group’s Richmond Tigers community. The Richmond Tigers directory on Yahoo!Groups has fifteen mailing lists.  Of these, ten are actually about the Richmond Tigers.  The lists are tiger_fury, sydrfc, tiger-talk, rfceyeofthetiger, RFC_Tigers, RFC-Tigers, rfctigerlovers, go_tigs87, feralrfc, and richmondtigers.   Of these, one has no posts (rfctigerlovers), one has one post (tiger_fury), four have ten or fewer posts (rfceyeofthetiger, RFC_Tigers,go_tigs87, richmondtigers), one has 20 posts (sydrfc), one has 4,874 posts (RFC-Tigers) and one has 92,687 (tiger-talk) as of the end of 2009.  If tiger-talk is not included, the average total membership to these groups is 22.  tiger-talk has 477 members and allows anyone to join but new members are moderated.  This keeps out the worst of the spam.  The half of the lists were created in 2003.  Two were created in 1999 and 2000.  One list was created in 2005.  Unlike the Swans, Bombers, Dockers and Bulldogs, this particular Yahoo!Groups population had some very active lists where the total volume on the list surpassed the total activity for all other groups.  Adding the legitimate posting volume together across all lists, the following chart was created:

To be honest, the posting patterns here are closer to what I expected to find for most teams: Big spikes during the season with and overall decline in activity as the population shifted away from Yahoo!Groups to other services.  That the minimal activity for other teams appeared to coincide with a team’s overall performance was rather surprising.

If I get the chance/have the time to go through and add data for team specific mailing lists not in the right subcategory, I may have to revisit some of the data I already posted to see if things change and more patterns like this one emerge.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• The AFL on Yahoo!Groups
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• An NRL social media / web data pack