Archive for category Claxton Shield

Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom

Posted by Laura on Saturday, 9 January, 2010

The following chart is based on the data gathered for posts to date.  It is intended to give a general idea as to the comparative size of various sports fandom communities to each other.  Blanks indicate that no data regarding that team on the service has been gathered; it does not indicate a size of zero for that particularly service.  If you would like specific data regarding a team on a service to understand where that number of coming from, please comment or e-mail me at laura[at]fanhistory[dot]com.  I am more than happy to explain it.

Leagues with teams at the bottom include AFL, AHL, A-League, Claxton Shield, Gridiron Australia Nationals, KFC Twenty20 Big Bash, NBL, Rugby League/State of Origin, Victorian Amateur Football Association.  The AFL’s expansion team puts one of their teams in the bottom 10.  Soccer teams, baseball teams, American/Gridiron football, basketball, netball, rugby union, ice hockey, rugby league and Australian rules football are at the bottom.  Some of these sports can be accounted for because of they are not popular sports in the country.  Others can be accounted for because the teams are part of secondary leagues and competitions.  It will be interesting to see how and if popularity shifts as more data is added from additional networks.

Edited to add: This post mostly came about as I needed to take a break from gathering Yahoo!Groups data.  The directory currently is not working for me.  It limits my ability to data gather as a result.  Two of the big things in terms of moving a team up or down the above list are Facebook and Twitter.  Facebook has a lot of voids and that’s easy enough to fill in.  I did that.  Things at the bottom didn’t change much but things at the top really did change with four clubs above the 40,000 fans threshold.

Given the huge leaps there, I cannot really foresee the top order changing much, especially as the Twitter data is already there. The other social networks out there just do not have populations to provide an audience that size. Facebook claims that 7,680,420 people are from Australia on its service. When 50,000 list their interest as the Magpies or the Blues, well, that’s .6% of all Australians on Facebook. Or put another way, 3 out of every 500 Australians on the site list one of those two teams as an interest. For a sports team, that seems really high and about on par for the most popular sports team in other countries. (The New York Yankees have about 785,000 fans for an American population of about 101,468,000 on Facebook. That puts the percentage at about .7%.)

Yahoo!Groups doesn’t have a large population. While bebo is popular in Australia, it doesn’t provide numbers even close to this. The only way to get numbers that large are to find community specific sites which require registration.

More edited to add: One of the things I did not realize with the various data sets I’ve been compiling is that about a third of the teams in the National Rugby League aren’t included. My bad. Most of my focus has been on the AFL. Hence, the oversight. I’ve compiled that again and rather than update with a third image, just going to say that there have been no major shake ups. The Brisbane Broncos remain on thop. The St. George Dragons are at the bottom with 240 fans. Second to last are the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs with 1,580. No team really has the big number of fans that the AFL has.

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Claxton Shield on Twitter

Posted by Laura on Tuesday, 5 January, 2010

The Claxton Shield is the premiere competition in for baseball in Australia.  It is organized by the Australian Baseball Federation and includes the Perth Heat, Victoria Aces, New South Wales Patriots, Queensland Rams teams.  The competition is the one of the main things that has been consistent in the baseball community with two leagues having become defunct.

Looking around, the Australian baseball community does not appear to have a stronghold on social networks like bebo,blogger or LiveJournal.  They do however have a small presence on Twitter: The extent of which is the account run by the Perth Heat.  The team has 35 followers.  Twitter Analyzer seems a bit off with their count for where followers come from for the team.  It says that the Heat have 36 American followers, 4 Dutch followers, 4 Irish followers, 12 followers from Ecuador and 32 followers from Australians.  Stats like those are why I have a huge problem with Twitter Analyzer but I’m not sure what tool does a better job at counting.  The Perth Heat do a fairly good job at updating regularly, providing scores, links to updated rosters and their social profiles elsewhere.  (They link to their Facebook fanpage, where they have 1,110 fans.)  The one thing they don’t do particularly well is interact.

It seems like Twitter would be a great potential tool for Claxton Shield and its teams to market itself as Twitter ranks 12th in Australia according to Alexa.  Second tier sports should definitely contemplate using it, in combination with YouTube and Facebook, to promote themselves so they can reach a wider audience.  People can accidentally find their content through @ replies, retweets, related videos that can help develop more organic interest in them.  If Australia is ever going to get another league like ABL and IBLA and have it be successful, this sort of thing needs to be done.

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