Ozzie Sport

The Gold Coast Suns announced their team name in 2010.  They will play in the AFL this year for the first time.  It is interesting to try to watch the growth of the fan community and interest around the club.  Recently, I’ve been getting some data from ebay.com.au as I’m curious about patterns for listing items about sport around events that take place in the community.  I believe I referenced some of this data in my St Kilda nude photo scandal chapter.

I was looking through some of this data and found what appears to be an interesting pattern for the Gold Coast Suns on ebay.com.au, for the search term Gold Coast Suns.

If you ignore the fourth of January, which is still part of the holiday season in Australia, the total number of items for the teach has increased over time.   It looks like there appears to be more materials available to list, possibly people who think that more people are interested in buying Gold Coast Suns related items, etc.  It suggests that the team’s fan base is gearing up in preparation for the season and probably suggests good things for the team.

Related Posts:

• Australian sport on ebay
• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• Twitter popularity of AFL teams by electorate
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This is mostly for my own interest. Data for these sites is because I have a script to automatically fetch this information. Foursquare is when I have identified games. Alexa and Twitter are gotten daily. Facebook is every third day. Trying to determine a schedule for ebay.

Any thoughts? Are the results for the most popular and least popular teams who you would have predicted?

1. Alexa site Australian rank data was from February 14, 2011. The Australian rank was subtracted from 35,000 in order to award high ranking teams with more points.
2. Totals are based on total checkins to the NAB Cup games played on February 11, 2011.
3. Twitter totals are from February 14, 2011 and count total followers to the official team Twitter account.
4. Facebook totals are from the official fanpage. Data was gathered on February 13, 2011.
5. Ebay data is based on http://ozziesport.com/2011/02/australian-sport-on-ebay/ that post. When team info was not available, it was searched for on February 14, 2011.

Related Posts:

• Australian sport on ebay
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In a recent post, I talked about what I saw as the importance of the GWS Giants in developing a local fanbase.  This post is another that explores the geography of Australian Football League fandom as a function of geography.

This post is based on data gathered using the following methodology:

1. Develop a list of  AFL related Twitter accounts and sort them by team.  Remove all AFL accounts that cannot be connected to a team.
2. Get a lot of the followers for all those sport related Twitter accounts.   (This process takes a while.  I can only use one Twitter API code set.  This limits the number of calls I can make to something like 150 or 350 per hour.  For each of those individual calls, I can get information on one page of a account’s followers.  Each page consists of about 20 followers.  This means the whole run took about a week and it started on January 18.)
3. Cross reference User inputted locations to actual Australian city locations .
4. Combine all followers by sportinto one file.  Remove duplicate entries so that if, for example Person X follows  @stkildafc, and @zacd_6 Person X gets counted once for Australian Rules, not two times.
5. Count the total number of followers by AFL team and by city.
6. Combine the total number of followers by sport with all the cities in the electorate the city is from.  For this analysis, that data can be found at Australian city location to electorates .  This list was created using the official list of Australian polling places by electorate.  The following cities were left off the totals: Brisbane, Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Canberra.  These cities were left off because they would skew the results as people that say they are living in Melbourne are actually probably living in a different suburb.  (The CBD of these centers is very tiny.  There are probably more people claiming to live in Melbourne on Twitter than actually living in Melbourne CBD proper.)  If a town is included in multiple electorates, it is counted in all those electorates: Brunswick and Brunswick East  are counted for both Melbourne and Wills.

The complete totals for the results above are available at Australian Twitter Sports Electorates Report. The raw data is too large to easily upload.  If you would like access to it, please leave a comment.

Related Posts:

• Australian sport on ebay
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Eventually, I’m going to do a paper looking at the development of the fandom for the GWS Giants online.  In the mean time, I’ll probably just dribble out some data context and analysis free.  The table below includes Alexa Rankings for GWS Giants related sites and for the Gold Coast Suns.  The Suns are offered as a counterpoint to see how another new club is doing.  Australian Alexa Rankings only appear if the site appears as a top 100,000 site in the country.

For a period of a few months, the Giant’s Australian rankings just disappeared.  Relaunching with a new domain meant that it took a couple of days before the site appeared again.  The domain switch probably contributes to the disappearance of their old site.  The lack of ranking probably hints a bit that the club neglected to promote (or successfully) promote their website in the lead up to the announcement and with their GWS for ACT campaign.

Related Posts:

• Most popular AFL teams across social media sites (February 14, 2011)
• Australian sport on ebay
• Twitter popularity of AFL teams by electorate
• GWS Giants on Twitter: Follower location versus Tweet location