Wikipedia says that the AHL is Australia’s “premier national domestic field hockey competition. Despite its non-professional nature, AHL is considered one of the strongest and most competitive national field hockey leagues in the world.” There is a men’s and women’s league. On the men’s side, the teams include New South Wales Waratahs, NT Stingers, Southern Hotshots, Tassie Tigers, Victoria Vikings, and WA Thundersticks.
Unsurprisingly, no one lists these teams as an interest on blogger, LiveJournal or LiveJournal’s clones. These are niche teams for a small audience. The sport isn’t likely to have much international interest. The league isn’t professional. The Australian audience on these services isn’t that big or active. It seems unlikely that they will ever garner a community around them unless some one comes in and brings their own audience for this content.
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This post is similar to the one for the ANZ Championship where I went to Facebook, found all the relevant fanpages and groups for a team, got their member lists, identified the city or country that a network was based out of and then counted added those together. This collection of teams is much, much bigger with about 200 cities or so and Microsoft MapPoint didn’t do a very good job as it missed 119 cities when Cairns and the Gold Coast are excluded. This makes things a bit tricky when trying to determine the geographic distribution of the community on Facebook. (Added to that, Map Point doesn’t want to put Cairns and the Gold Coast on the same map.)
One thing to note before looking at this, I’ve again excluded non-Australian and non-Kiwi members. If I was doing work for these teams professionally though? I would really target international student populations at the major universities and at high schools where there are high school exchange students. It looks like these fans account for a fair amount of fans on Facebook. Once they leave Australia though, those fans begin to lose value as the chance to monetize them is much less effective. They can add numbers to official Facebook fan pages but they aren’t likely to generate revenue. If a team’s goal is to convert people into potential ticket buyers, this is a problem. (For leagues such as the NRL and AFL where there is an international television agreement, I’d advise them make occasional posts reminding their non-native audience how they can tune in, encourage them to demand that their local satellite and cable providers give them access to these games to watch.)
Onwards with maps…
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NBL fandom by state
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220 |
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110 |
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0 |
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Adelaide 36ers |
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Cairns Taipans |
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Gold Coast Blaze |
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Melbourne Tigers |
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New Zealand Breakers |
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Perth Wildcats |
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South Melbourne Dragons |
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Townsville Crocodiles |
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Wollongong Hawks |
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NBL by city
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70 |
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8 |
 |
1 |
 |
Adelaide 36ers |
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Melbourne Tigers |
 |
New Zealand Breakers |
 |
Perth Wildcats |
 |
South Melbourne Dragons |
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Townsville Crocodiles |
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Wollongong Hawks |
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