author: Laura Hale

Gaia Online is a role playing network that has a number of social networking components. It is relatively popular in Australia and tends to cater to a teenaged audience. This type of audience may be a desirable for Australian and Kiwi women’s sport because reaching them may encourage participation in those sport and help improve women’s fitness. Beyond that, getting a younger audience can help insure the continuity of the team’s fandom by having fans who can pass on those allegiances as they get older. At the same time, younger fans likely will need to bring friends or family to attend competitions. This means a potential to maximize ticket sales.

An Australian and Kiwi sport community does exist on the Gaia Online. It is just relatively small and focused on soccer, rugby union, rugby league and Aussie rules.

Given the tiny size of the Australian and Kiwi sport population for men, it is hardly surprising that when profile interests were searched, no one was a fan of women’s sport.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Friendster and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups

Flickr is a photo sharing site owned by Yahoo. According to Alexa, it is the 36th most popular site on the Internet and 30th most popular in Australia. Flickr has made it easy for people to upload their pictures on the move by creating mobile applications that allow sharing from phone’s camera.

To get an idea for the popularity of Flickr in Australia and New Zealand, a search was done for Australia in the pictures search section. It had 5,856,165 results. A search for Sydney had 2,678,431 results. A search for New Zealand had 2,136,668 results. The interest in taking pictures of both countries is high.

Interest in sport is also high. A search for all the AFL teams results in around 200 to 500 images each. There are several groups on Flickr specifically dedicated to the league and its teams. The generic term surf Australia has 73,441 results, demonstrating that interest goes beyond traditional professional sports and into niche sport and participation sports. Sport organizations inside Australia have begun to realize its value: Canoeing Australia has set up its own Flickr account to upload pictures.

Why are picture sites like Flickr important? What can they tell us about Australian and Kiwi women’s sport? They are important because they help grow the visibility of the sport. Well composed, beautiful pictures can help really sell sport in a way that text, the primary method of sharing on most of the sites referenced so far, cannot. This visibility could translate into ticket and event sales: These women play so beautifully I should check them out in person. Beyond that aspect, Flickr can also help identify what type of content that people are interested in based on the type of pictures they take. This group can thus be catered to more by creating events or providing similar content on a team or athlete’s internet stream. If there are a lot of event pictures, have a meet up for Flickr and Picassa users during a practice session where they are invited to take pictures of athletes in motion. If there are a lot of pictures that are like head shots and traditional promotional images, then a consideration should be made to include more of that content and make it available where online users can access it. Both of these require a bit of content analysis but a most people will be looking at only only team or a few athletes, this becomes much more feasible.

Pictures can also be useful in terms of identifying potential employees. If there are one or two people who take beautiful pictures, they might be worth contacting to see if they can be brought in in an official capacity. Their work sells the team or athlete already, but by doing that, you help add validation to their work which might get them a bigger audience. This in turn can lead to increased visibility for the team or athlete as each party gets the benefit of the other’s audience.

Beyond the issues above, another way of understanding photographer interest in women’s sport involves the total search results, which when compared to other teams can be useful. It gives another perspective on the comparative interest amongst the more creative classes of Internet users and the kind who get out into the real world to engage in the things that they love. Group results and total members to those groups provides perspective on the total comparative audience for the work of photographers.

The table below includes data from all the total search results found by searching Flickr for total number of images related to a keyword. It is sorted by league and then team. It highlights the popularity of swimming in Australia, though the search results rarely refer to Swimming Australia sanctioned events or Australian swimmers who compete internationally. The W-League results are extremely high and undoubtedly include pictures from the American league with the same name. When looking at individual teams, it appears that the ANZ Championship, W-League and WNBL all have comparative levels of interest. The Australian Women’s Ice Hockey League has zero results and there is obviously much less interest in it.

The table below includes the results when searching for groups related to Australian and New Zealand women’s sport. The total search results is small and there are no relevant groups. This suggests a couple of possible things. First, that while people are interested in taking pictures of women’s sport, they do not see their primary interests being focused around organizing people around women’s sport. Second, being photographers of specific women’s sport is not part of their internalized identity in such a way that they need to continually affirm it. Third, that Flickr may not have a large audience for specific Australian and New Zealand women’s sport that the upload totals might suggest is there.

Related Posts:

• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

friendster is small social networks.  Alexa ranks it as the 685th most popular site on the Internet and the 1,483th most popular site in Australia.  It is not nearly as popular as Facebook or Twitter, but is more popular than bebo and appears to have a slightly more active community.  In 2009, friendster was acquired by an Asian company and sought a more Asian audience and worked to improve the mobile version of the site.  Given that, the direction of the site, if Australian and Kiwi sport teams are looking at friendster, it should probably be with an eye towards growing their Asian audience.  This focus would not necessarily lend itself to women’s sport outside of soccer.

Despite the potentially limiting audience and best approach to using the site, it is worth looking at as the more sites examined, the greater the understanding of how Australian and Kiwi women sport fandom exist on the Internet.

One of the ways friendster fosters communities is through groups.  There are several Australian sport related groups, including one for the Socceroos with over a hundred members and one for the Melbourne Victory with over sixty.   While this community for men’s sport exist, the same does not appear to be true for women.

Searching friendster groups is done by country.  For this, search was conducted for Australian groups.  If quotation marks are not used, every group that mentions any of those terms is used.  That means that pages and pages of search results need to be sorted through or quotation marks need to be used in order to improve search results.  This is not ideal as many women’s sport teams use common words or have multiple names, if sponsor names are considered.  The results below give an idea as to how this plays out.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Ecademy and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Bebo and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport

This list is far from complete. It is a beginning attempt on my part to really start to work on it. I’m hoping the labels regarding official/unofficial pages are accurate but they are worth double checking just to be sure. If you know of any fanpages or groups I should be watching that aren’t on this list, comment to let me know.

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ecademy is a small social network for business professionals that is an alternative to LinkedIn. It has a small number of people connected to Australian sport. In using and evaluating ecademy, it should be looked at from the perspective of using it liked in: Developing a network of employees, volunteers and athletes who can help network with other professionals to bring in an audience of potential sponsors and higher income bracket fans.

Given the nature of ecademy, the total number of people who have clubs listed in their profiles should not be gauged as a representation of fandom on the network. Rather, it should be looked at as industry professionals who want to be affiliated with the club or league.

One of the challenges involved with measuring membership on ecademy is that team sport names may not be the name of organization that runs the club or league. This could possibly exclude some people actually connected to them. For example, in the W-League, most teams are run by the state football associations, not by a specific organization with the club’s name in the title.

The table below gives an idea as to the historical size of the Australian and Kiwi women’s sport community on the network.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• 43 Things and Australian women’s sport
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eBay is an extremely popular site in Australia. Alexa pegs it as the 6th most popular in the country. It is similar to a digital garage sale, only there is an economic incentive to only submit items that the seller things can actually sell. If they don’t sell, the seller makes no money and may be subjected to additional eBay related fees.

Sport related goods are a huge part eBay. For men’s Australian sport, there is a category for the AFL and one for the NRL. On November 27, there were over 42,643 items in the AFL category alone. On a page of auction only AFL results, 12 of the 50 items listed had bids. People might not be buying everything but over 20% had bids, which seems really good.

Given all this, it seems to be a fair assumption that the volume of items related to a team or athlete indicate a certain level of popularity.

The tables below are sorted by league/federation and can begin to give an idea of relative popularity of a team or player. As other networks have demonstrated, the volume around a player/team increases during periods when they are in competition. The level of merchandise available for the AFL suggests that this pattern may not hold. A variety of factors clearly influence when items are listed. Until more data is available, it be likely best to assume that merchandise will be available at all times, with volume peaking around important sport related events or major news stories.

ANZ Championship

There is some merchandise available for ANZ Championship teams. It does not appear like there is consistently merchandise of some available for all teams. In this case, it seems likely that there would be an increase in items during the season.

Athletics Australia

Despite recent appearances at the Commonwealth Games by many of these female athletes, it does not appear to have translated into people selling merchandise featuring them. Additional visibility of these athletes because of their Twitter presence also appears to have failed in generating interest. This suggests that there is a lack of die hard fans around Athletics Australia’s female athletes.

Australian Rugby Union

Earlier this year, the Wallaroos competed in the Women’s Rugby World Cup. They did fairly well. Women’s Rugby Union has also been given a boost by the inclusion of Rugby 7s in the Olympics. These two events do not seem to have resulted in any merchandise related to the team being available on eBay.

AWIHL

The AWIHL season is currently underway. Still, ice hockey is a niche sport in Australia and there is unlikely to be much merchandise available. Given these two factors, it is not surprising that nothing is listed for the AWIHL.

Basketball Australia

The Opals are the Australian women’s national team. They have the problem of their name being a common phrase and a market for stones like opals existing on eBay. While there are search results for the team’s name, looking at the results, none of them appear to be for the team.

WNCL

The women’s cricket season is underway in Australia. The Breakers and Spirit are very active on Twitter in terms of promoting their team. These two factors likely account for the availability of merchandise on eBay. The Victorian Spirit’s name means that not everything in the search results relates to the team, which becomes apparent when the word cricket is put into the search.

Cycling Australia

Cycling Australia is represented by a number of female cyclists. These cyclists are all on Twitter. There does not appear to be much available related to them on eBay. What is available appears to be biographies about the athlete. The lack of merchandise may be related to the cycling season being over in the northern hemisphere; it may be possible that there could be an increase during that period.

Football Federation Australia

The Matildas are on their way to the Women’s World Cup in June/July 2011. They recently completed their qualifying in the AFL. Their players are much more visible right now because of the start of the W-League season. These things don’t appear to have created interest in people to list items for sale on eBay. The one item currently listed is a 2000 nude calendar.

Football New South Wales

The Flying Bats are a local lesbian soccer team based in Sydney. There is no merchandise relevant to them on eBay. Given that this is a club side, this makes sense. At the same time, there is often a lot of lesbian merchandise on eBay and it often sells pretty well. It seems probable that some one might have been willing to exploit that to make a few dollars, and yet no one has.

Hockey Australia

The Hockeyroos recently appeared in the Commonwealth Games. They did a great job. They have also played in a few internationals since then. Despite this, there does not appear to be a large amount of merchandise available related to them on eBay.

Netball Australia

Netball Australia’s national team is coming off the Commonwealth Games and are currently playing a number of friendly internationals. The team’s name makes it hard to separate out the team from diamonds that are from Australia when looking at lots on eBay. This means that Netball Australia as a search is likely more accurate in terms of gauging interest.

Netball New South Wales

Netball Victoria

Skate Australia

Ski and Snowboard Australia

There was increased interest in these athletes in response to their performances in the Winter Olympics. In the case of Torah Bright, she won a gold medal and was put on a stamp.

Association of Surfing Professionals

Triathlon Australia

None of the search results for this athlete are actually about the athlete. Rather, they are books about astrology.

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)

digg is similar to social news.  Users submit links. Then other users can “digg” the links to indicate that the like them or thumb down the links if they do not.  The more “diggs” a link gets, the greater its visibility is on the site.  If it gets enough likes, it may be featured on the front page.  Being featured on the front page is considered highly desirable by many sites as it means a lot of traffic that they might not get otherwise.

According to Alexa on November 27, digg ranks 103 in Australia.  The AFL appears to have an official digg account, which they use to promote some of the articles that appear on their site.  Despite these two favorables, digg does not appear to play an important role in Australia’s sport fandom picture.  Over in men’s sport, when the Joel Monaghan story broke, it wasn’t Australians who submitted links to digg about it; rather, articles were submitted by Americans, a Kiwi and an Indonesian.  Similarly, two of the three links found for the ACT Brumbies were submitted by South Africans; only one was submitted by an Australian.  In a sample of around 200 unique Australian sport related digg submitted links, the average story had only 2.7 diggs, and median and mode of 1 digg per article.  Australian sport related articles are just not getting much attention on the site.  This reinforces the view that digg does not have a large, active community of sport fans despite its popularity in Australia.

Data was gathered on digg for Canberra United.  In gathering this data, a few other W-League teams were also picked up.  Getting information on the W-League continued to be problematic because the W-League shares a name with a US league and the W-League teams, with the exception of Canberra, share names with their A-League counterparts.  The easiest way to find W-League related links submitted on digg is to find a user who has submitted one link, and then see what else the user has submitted.
The links fall into two general categories: 1) Where to watch the games streaming. 2) Team profiles and game news.  The type of link submitted was based on who was submitting it.  In both cases, the links were posted during the W-League season, which suggests that interest in mentioning the league is not maintained during the off season.

The timeline of links being submitted also suggests that the digg users who posted them were posting them as part of a large digg submission effort: The digg submissions were not spread out over the season. It would be interesting to see if this pattern was repeated for other leagues, clubs and athletes.  If it is, it suggests other fundamental problems with the Australian and Kiwi female sport community on digg.  Namely, it suggests that people are less interested in long term promotion of sport but are focused on one off promotion of their sites to improve their own site’s visibility.  They are not necessarily interested in promoting women’s sport in a wider context.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Friendster and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• BlackPlanet and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport

Compete is an analytics company similar to Alexa. It also collects information from user installed toolbars to calculate how many estimated unique visitors sites get each months. Compete’s calculations are based on US visitors only. Given that, it has limited usage for female Australian sport teams. It’s best usage potential is likely for individual female athletes who have sponsorship deals. In this context, the athlete’s reach in the American market can begin to be understand, especially in the context of other athletes from around the world that compete in the same sport and with all female Australian athletes.

This thinking is born out when traffic stats are looked at. The Australian tennis player, Sam Stosur, has the most American traffic of everyone looked at. Her traffic peaked during the northern Summer and when most of the tennis competitions were going on. There appears to be an exception counter to this rule with the Adelaide Adrenaline that cannot be easily explained as the June 2010 does not appear to coincide with the AWIHL season. It does coincide with the men’s season, where the domain is shared by the men’s team. The men’s team has an American player.

Related Posts:

• Site rank and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• eBay.com.au and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport

care2 is a small social network dedicated to people who are interested in making a difference. There is a small population of Australians and Australian sport fans on the network. The network is interesting because it allows its users to blog, create petitions, join groups and upload photos. Despite being a niche network for activist, it has all the features that most social networks have an its users take advantage of them to post about their own interests. The type of user here is different than some of the other types of fans online and given their activist interest, they might be worth courting as they may provide positive brand associations if their activist work matches with the philosophy of the team.

While the Socceroos may have four mentions in blogs and the Fremantle Dockers have twenty-four, Australian women’s sport do not fair nearly as well.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Friendster and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• 43 Things and Australian women’s sport

blogger is a popular blog hosting site. Many popular Australian and sports blogs use it. In the United States, the site also has high press visibility because of its inclusion in Google’s blog search and the number or journalists using Google Alerts, which pulls its notifications from Google’s blog search. The reliance on blogspot has been decreasing as people have eased away from blogging or switched to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The Australian sport population is smaller than that of Bebo but larger than that of 43 Things. For example, Collingwood had 68 fans on bebo and 7 people with Collingwood related goals on 43 Things. Blogger has 22.

Beyond the press reliance on using blogger as a source, another thing that makes a blogger audience desirable is that the format encourages people to write more. That additional content should encourage people to be more thoughtful and create dialogs around the team that they are blogging about. Theoretically, the longer and more prolonged the engagement that fans have regarding their team, the more likely they are to reaffirm their relationship with the team.

Sadly, the size of the Australian and Kiwi women’s sport community on blogger is non-existent when compared to their male counterparts. The lone fan of the Matildas is a male from South Australia.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)