Ozzie Sport

I’ve been some what lax with collecting data during the past month.  This morning, I decided to remedy this a bit by updating my Alexa rank list for Australian sport clubs and teams.  This is what can be found below.  (The list isn’t all comprehensive.  I tend to mostly focus on the AFL and NRL.) It is interesting to see who is doing well, especially when compared to other clubs in the same league or clubs playing in the same geographic area.

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This post is basically an update of Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers. I haven’t actively sought to improve or update the accounts included on this list though there are a few new accounts.  A few accounts have been deleted and one has been suspended, LanceFranklin. Deleted and suspended accounts have been marked with a 0 for total number of followers.

This data was gathered on May 30, 2010.  It includes non-Australian teams that compete in Australian based leagues.  It also contains Australian some athlete accounts where the athlete competes for a club in an Australian based league.

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bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones all have relatively small communities when compared to Facebook. It bothers me sometimes because to understand the size and shape of the online fan community on popular social networks almost requires looking at the site if I want to be accurate. The data you get from the advertising information is interesting but limited. Looking at fanpage and group membership is even more limited but at least you can get names and a better feel for location. I decided to do that for ANZ Championship teams. (There are just too many NRL and AFL and even NBL related groups for me to want to tackle at the moment.) I found the following list of groups and fan pages:

Some of these groups have as many as 1,000 members and some have as few as 13. I went looked at the membership list, found the people who belonged to specific networks, identified the location of that network and then created a map based on those. Some cases, like for corporations, have no city specific location and some of the schools on the list are affiliated with bigger towns near them. The map below differs a fair bit from the similar map for to the one for bebo, blogger and Facebook. The major difference? Regional fannishness is much, more more apparent on Facebook.

ANZ Championship on Facebook 40 6 1 Adelaide Thunderbirds Canterbury Tactix Melbourne Vixens Northern Mystics Queensland Firebirds West Coast Fever

ANZ Championship on Facebook 40 6 1 Adelaide Thunderbirds Canterbury Tactix Melbourne Vixens Northern Mystics Queensland Firebirds West Coast Fever

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I’m playing with Microsoft MapPoint. It is pretty awesome, except for the fact that some smaller cities don’t register. Anyway, I finished compiling the location of all fans of ANZ Champship teams on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones. Interest in this particular competition is small compared to the NRL, AFL and A-League. For a few people, fans didn’t list a city which makes getting an accurate idea of where fans are difficult. Two cities didn’t appear as they were really, really rural so they were excluded. I took this data and the output was the following map.

Australia Test by City 2 1 Adelaide Thunderbirds Melbourne Vixens New South Wales Swifts (Sydney Swifts) Northern Mystics Southern Steel Sydney Swifts

The map has that limited perspective because there were no Queensland based fans. That includes people who just listed state, not city. The same situation existed for Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and Northern Territory.

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New Zealand has several professional sports teams that compete in Australian and New Zealand based leagues.  The leagues that are involved with include the the A-League, ANZ Championship,  National Rugby League, and Super 14. The teams include Wellington Phoenix,    Northern Mystics,     Southern Steel,     Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic,    Canterbury Crusaders, and  New Zealand Warriors.  The map below only includes bebo and blogger users who list the team as an interest and list a city in New Zealand as their place of residence.  (I haven’t done LiveJournal and there were no fans on LiveJournal’s clones.)  The city communities involved are really small compared to some of their Australian peers.   Brisbane has 121 compared to Auckland’s 11.  To be fair though, Auckland had fans of Australian based teams and if those were included, they’d be at 22 instead of 11.  (Those 11 fans are all NRL fans of the following teams: Brisbane Broncos, Canberra Raiders, Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs, Gold Coast Titans.

New Zealand 18 4 1 Wellington Phoenix Northern Mystics Southern Steel Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic Canterbury Crusaders New Zealand Warriors

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The Central Pulse are a New Zealand based team in the Australian/New Zealand based ANZ Championship, the premiere netball competition in both countries.  Because the presence of Australian teams, it is being covered by this blog.

There is a small community of people listing the team as an interest on bebo.  It consists of four people.  Of these four, all are from New Zealand and all are female.  These two are not surprising given that this a female athletic team and the team is based in New Zealand.

The average and mean age of the three fans listing their age is 21.6 and 21 respectively.  This sample of three is the largest of all the other teams looked at on social networks so far.  With samples of one, the New South Wales Swifts community on LiveJournal, and the Melbourne Phoenix on blogger are both older at 22 and 32.  With samples of one, Adelaide Thunderbirds on bebo, and New South Wales Swifts on bebo are younger at 18 and 20.

Considering the population size of Australia compared to New Zealand, the most surprising thing about this bebo data is that the community is so big at 4 compared to Australian teams with 1.

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The New South Wales Swifts were originally the Sydney Swifts and part of the Commonwealth Bank Trophy.  When the event change and became the ANZ Championship and became more of a state versus state netball competition, the team’s name change.  The team names are used interchangably here depending on the original usage.

The team has been discussed in an earlier post about the size of the ANZ Championship community on Twitter.  This post will look into the specific community dedicated to the New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups.

There is one group dedicated to the Sydney Swifts on Yahoo!Groups.  It was created on May 16, 2001 and currently has 50 members.  The group has been neglected and been the subject of spam starting in 2005.  Prior to that, discussion on the list had ended in March 2002 (with the admin having deleted three spam e-mails in November 2003).  There were 84 legitimate posts to the list in this period.  Graphing it, the posting volume looks like:

This posting pattern is similar to that of the some of the less active AFL teams on Yahoo!Groups.  I joined the list to find out membership demographic information.  Only eleven of the current members joined when there was active posting to the list.  Ten people joined in the period with no posting, and the other 29 joined during periods of active spamming.   Of the 50, only four listed their demographic information.  When the list was active, the person who listed their age has 21, female and Australian.  After the period of active spam, the three people listing demographic information were all male and older.  Of the two who listed their country of residence, neither listed Australia.    (For the totals on Yahoo!Groups on my chart, this will listed at 50, despite the the fact that  only 21 or so are probably legitimately interested in the team.  At the moment, I do not have the time and ability to join every team related mailing list to determine who is and is not a legitimate poster based on join date.)

On LiveJournal, there are two people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest.  Of the two, one updated a week ago, is 22 and from New South Wales.  The other has not updated in 162 weeks and does not list a country of residence.

There are four people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest on bebo and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest.  Only one lists their age, 20.  The other three list their location and all are based i New South Wales.

The community on Twitter is the largest, with 90 people following the official team account.  Facebook, surprisingly, has no one listing the team as an interest.  Yahoo!Groups probably legitimately had the second largest following with 21 if we only count back in the day.  The fact that bebo and LiveJournal both have bigger interest than Facebook is also surprising.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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