Ozzie Sport

Australia lost its World Cup bid to Qatar. As an American going to university in Australia, I am sad on a number of fronts. That said, on my Twitter stream, there appear to be a number of people who are a bit sad but they want to get back to the business of football, the football that Australia that Australia does best.

Still, I want to investigate that Australia claim a bit. The only large scale information that I have that could be useful (I don’t exactly want to use LiveJournal or bebo to be representative of Australia. The communities there are just too small.) involves Twitter. The methodology I used is described a bit in Australia Sport Census: Most popular leagues in Melbourne on Twitter.

There are a couple of possible issues with the A-League and my Twitter data. The first is that I’m not as actively looking for Australian A-League accounts as I could be. My organic finding tends to be hung up a bit on AFL accounts as that’s where most of the people I follow come from. When I go hunting for new accounts, I tend to go looking for women’s accounts. I’d like to believe that the A-League is underrepresented. If that’s the case, the numbers by cities could be a bit off.

In Melbourne, the A-League ranks as 8th most popular and the World Cup Australian related accounts rank 11th. In Sydney, the World Cup for soccer ranks 12th and the A-League ranks 13th. In Brisbane, the A-League ranks 11th and the World Cup ranks 14th. In Adelaide, the A-League ranks 10th and the World Cup ranks 15th. In Canberra, the World Cup ranks 12th and the A-League ranks 17th. In Newcastle, the A-League ranks 5th. In Townsville, the A-League ranks 4th. In Gosford, the A-League ranks second. In Essendon, the A-League ranks 7th. This isn’t a bad position to be in. Often, three of the places above those involve cricket, where Shane Warne counts for Cricket Victoria, Michael Smith counts for Cricket New South Wales and ESPN’s Cricket site counts for Cricket Australia. That distribution pushes those numbers down a lot. The rankings also include things like the Rugby World Cup and Swimming Australia. It also counts Andrew Bogut for Basketball Australia. (He’s Australian and he plays for the Boomers.)

All things considered, the space that the A-League occupies isn’t a bad place to be. The league and the national teams have clearly established itself on Twitter, having found a significant soccer fanbase inside the country. It certainly is better placed than the NBL and ANZ Championship. In many cities, the A-League does better than the Super League. The A-League is also much better placed than second tier sports like the ABL and AIHL. It often does better against other popular sports like surfing, cycling and hockey.

That out of the way, what are the most popular cities for soccer? I don’t have comparative rankings for cities. (I suppose I should be able to get that at some point.) I can give the total number of followers by city and that’s what can be found in the table below.

Related Posts:

• Australian and New Zealand sport relationships on Twitter
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)

This list is not all comprehensive. Rather, it is intended to give an idea as to the relative popularity of women’s clubs, leagues and athletes on Facebook. This list includes groups and fanpages that are both official and unofficial.

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Australian and New Zealand sport relationships on Twitter
• Most popular female Australian (and NZ) sport related Twitter accounts (March 23)

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:

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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:

• Australian sport on ebay
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• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 1)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

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.

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

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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.

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43 things is a goal setting community found at http://www.43things.com/.  Compared to professional sports for men, the women related goals are less likely to exist and less likely to involve a component that expresses fandom such as a desire to buy a shirt or attend a championship match.  This presents two issues.  First, the number of goals related to women’s sport is less than men’s: There is clearly a gap in interest levels between men and men’s sport that needs to be addressed.  Beyond that, it highlights the idea that women’s sport does not have the built in spectatorship that men’s sport has and people do not identify as clearly as fans of these teams.

The table below begins to give an idea as to the amount of interest in randomly selected women’s clubs, leagues and athletes on 43things over time.  As you can see, there isn’t. For comparisons sake, the Fremantle Dockers have 5 goals, the Collingwood Magpies have 6, Hawthorn Hawks have 4 and the Melbourne Storm have 2.

It appears, based on the audience using the site, that growing the women’s sport related goals in an organic manner, done with out deliberation on the part of various stakeholders, appears unlikely.  There is barely an audience for men and the Australian population using the site is much smaller than on other networks.

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This is an updated version of from November 13 , November 16 and November 18.

If there is anyone missing, please let me know. I’m always happy to improve this list. I feel like there are probably more roller derby accounts out there that I’m missing. I also feel like there should be more Kiwi women on the list that I’m just not seeing. If anyone knows a good place to begin to find either group, please comment.

If anyone wants the list of followers for these accounts and all the public information that you basically see in the list below, please let me know and I will be happy to send you a csv file containing that information. I’m just hesitant to upload it as I only have so much bandwidth and I have about 805 files with follower information.

The biggest movers on this list appear to be ItsStephRice, RochelleGilmore, Sally_Fitz, gypsy_gilmore, libby_trickett who have all gained 50+ followers. This contrasts with kristy_giteau, MelissaBreen_, muirsop, TheFlyingBats, saltydolls, samikennedy, SportingSheilas, watsonjessica who all lost between 1 and 3 followers, which if you think about it isn’t that many followers.

Related Posts:

• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (January 2)