I’ve not been updating here much of late because of some real life issues. Fun fun. If anyone wants a copy of the data I have so far, please let me know.
That said, I searched for the Adelaide 36ers on Yahoo!Groups. There is one list dedicated to the team: 36ers. It was created on March 19, 2003. It has one member and there have never been any posts to the list. The list appears in the general basketball category.
Even with one member, the community size on Yahoo!Groups is bigger than that of the LiveJournal clones.
It will be interesting to see how the size of the community here compares to the other NBL teams.
Related Posts:
Once again, problem is problem. This time it involves the New South Wales Blues, a name for the first class cricket team and the Rugby League State of Origin team. When a search is done for groups on bebo, all of the results are for the Rugby League State of Origin team. A few of the people on search appeared to have pictures of playing rugby. None had cricket related pictures. This suggests that people are fans of the Rugby League team, not the cricket team. For bebo, the results of this search for this team will thus be slotted for that league, rather than cricket.
Related Posts:
As mentioned in the earlier post, I’m focusing on a broad range of teams. I went looking for information on the Australian Hockey League teams and first class cricket teams. One problem that came up involved the Tasmanian Tigers. Why? That is a team name for a team in the AHL and for Australian first class cricket. It isn’t particularly problematic on LiveJournal clones, where no one lists the Tassie Tigers as an interest. It does get problematic on blogger, where two people list the Tasmanian Tigers as an interest. Looking at both profiles, the assumption can probably safely be made that the Americans are interested in the animal, not the hockey or cricket teams. It isn’t particularly problematic on bebo, where the only person listing Tasmanian Tigers as an interest has a cricket icon. LiveJournal has 23 people listing Tasmanian Tigers as an interest and I have yet to go through each profile to try to guess which one they meant. Meep.
This is another example of a problem team that makes trying to figure out the fan community size problematic.
Related Posts:
I should really focus pretty much exclusively on the NRL, the AFL, the NBL and the VFL with a minor diversion into first class cricket and the ANZ Championship. At one point, I compiled a list of some 3,500+ sports teams in Australia. Running through the top flight teams for all sports and the minors for the major sports is an exercise in overwhelming. Still, I like to look on the networks I’ve been focused on.
One of the side leagues that I’ve been looking at is Gridiron Australia, the league for American football. I had the list of teams. I check everything on LiveJournal, its clones, blogger and then bebo. At bebo, I realized I had a problem. For the Victorian Eagles, no problem. (There is one fan. He is male, 21 years old and from Victoria.) There is one person for the Queensland Sundevils. For the SA Fire? There were 40. Turns out that there is an artist named SA-fire. It also sometime short for the San Antonio Fire Department. Given that, the short form isn’t a search form that will be used. (Though one or two of the people who list SA Fire as an interest are clearly South Australia Fire team.) The long form search is the one that goes for bebo. With that search, there are only two people who list them as an interest.
Related Posts:
The New South Wales Blues are first class cricket team based at the Sydney Cricket Grounds. According to Wikipedia, they compete in most of the major cricket tournaments in the country. There is a small community interested in the team on LiveJournal and its clones with 17 people list the NSW Blues as an interest and 2 on JournalFen. This isn’t particularly big for LiveJournal, 101 people list the Sydney Swans as an interest and 100 people list the West Coast Eagles as an interest in comparison. The teams sits between the Carlton Blues at 18 and the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks at 16.
Of the two people on JournalFen, only one lists their year of birth: 1975. Of the 17 on LiveJournal, ten list their year of birth. On LiveJournal, the mean year of birth is 1986.4, median is 1987.5 and mode of 1992. This is pretty close to the Sydney based Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs community on LiveJournal where mean is 1985 and median is 1987. No other Sydney based teams where I have this data for other networks are as close to the team age wise.
Most fans are Australian with both JournalFen people listing the country as their place of residence and 14 of the 17 on LiveJournal being from Australia. Of the other three, one does not list a country, one is from Canada and one is from New Zealand. Of the Australians on JournalFen, one is from New South Wales and one is from the ACT. On LiveJournal, 2 are from the ACT, 8 are from New South Wales and 2 are from Victoria. All but one of the people from New South Wales list themselves as being from Sydney; the one who doesn’t is from Gosford, which isn’t that far from Sydney.
Related Posts:
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.
Related Posts:
Tags:
AHL,
blogger,
Canberra Labor Club Lakers,
CrazyLife,
DeadJournal,
dreamwidth,
Inksome,
insanejournal,
JournalFen,
LiveJournal,
New South Wales Waratahs,
NT Stingers,
Southern Hotshots,
Tassie Tigers,
Victoria Vikings,
WA Thundersticks Category:
AHL,
DeadJournal,
Dreamwidth,
InsaneJournal,
JournalFen,
LiveJournal,
blogger
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…
 |
|
NBL fandom by state
 |
220 |
 |
110 |
 |
0 |
 |
Adelaide 36ers |
 |
Cairns Taipans |
 |
Gold Coast Blaze |
 |
Melbourne Tigers |
 |
New Zealand Breakers |
 |
Perth Wildcats |
 |
South Melbourne Dragons |
 |
Townsville Crocodiles |
 |
Wollongong Hawks |
|
|
 |
|
NBL by city
 |
70 |
 |
8 |
 |
1 |
 |
Adelaide 36ers |
 |
Melbourne Tigers |
 |
New Zealand Breakers |
 |
Perth Wildcats |
 |
South Melbourne Dragons |
 |
Townsville Crocodiles |
 |
Wollongong Hawks |
|
|
Related Posts:
Tags:
Adelaide 36ers,
Cairns Taipans,
Facebook,
Gold Coast Blaze,
Melbourne Tigers,
NBL,
New Zealand Breakers,
Perth Wildcats,
South Melbourne Dragons,
Townsville Crocodiles,
Wollongong Hawks Category:
Facebook,
NBL
