Ozzie 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:

• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Site rank and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs

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
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

BlackPlanet is a small social networked targeted at African Americans. There is a small community of Australian sport fans on the site. They tend to prefer rugby. The development of an Australian and Kiwi women’s sport community on the site is probably hampered by the tiny community that exists for men. Some of the women’s sport, like netball and cricket, are also a bit niche and not popular in America. Even if there was a desire to create interest on this network, there is not likely the onsite population to make it happen.

Related Posts:

• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia
• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

Bebo is a social networking site that is popular in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The site’s traffic has been down in the past year or so. It traditionally has has a fairly large contingent of Australian sport fans, with most people being fans of the NRL. It has a smaller population of fans for other sports like the AFL and NBL. There were questions regarding bebo’s viability for most of 2010, when there were rumors that the site would be shut down if it failed to find a buyer. This and a variety of other factors, such as the popularity of Facebook and YouTube, have led to a lot of once active users becoming inactive.
Despite the issues regarding inactivity, it is a site worth looking at to begin to give a snapshot of sorts back in time, to understand the size of Australian and Kiwi women’s sport fandom four years ago to a year ago, when activity levels dropped off. It might be possible to determine where these fans migrated to by looking at growth on other niche networks, which could be useful for determining engagement strategies. This data can also give an idea as to what was popular. If the comparative levels of interest on other networks are not similar, it could suggest that clubs have failed with their marketing strategies or have found a method to really engage in their audience that other clubs could benefit from.

When looking at bebo, there are a variety of ways to do that. One of the first is to use search result totals, and compare the size of the community to other teams and over time. The second way is to look at the size groups/views for videos. The third way is to look at the demographic data for people who lit the team as an interest. This will be broken down by league/federation.

Search: ANZ Championship
The ANZ Championship is the most successful women’s (semi) professional league in Australia.  It makes sense that the team would have the largest amount of interest on bebo.  While this is true,  the community size, the number of groups and videos created by these fans is still extremely limited.  (Their counterparts in the AFL often have 200 to 400 people who list them as an interest.)

Search: AWIHL
This is a niche league, where the men’s team also fail to have people who list them as an interest. If there is an ice hockey fan base in Australia, it is not on bebo.

W-League
Somewhat surprisingly, the W-League fanbase on bebo appears to be a bit larger than that of the ANZ Championship. One possible factor for this could be that the overall fan community for soccer is really large on bebo. Another contributing factor could be that the Canberra United attract male fans to the sport that a W-League team may not otherwise get because the United do not have to compete with an A-League club in their city: If you love soccer in Canberra, you support the top level competitions here. Bebo also has a community of people who uploaded videos. Soccer videos are really popular across the whole of the network. Given that, W-League fans may be part of a larger part of video uploading culture that ANZ Championship fans are removed from.

One issue at play with W-League results is that Canberra United content is easier to pull out than the Melbourne Victory, because secondary keywords are needed to differentiate Melbourne Victory W-League results from A-League results. This means that real numbers for the W-League teams could be understated. Similar issues of a sort exist for the W-League, which shares a name with an American women’s soccer competition. This could lead to an over representation when just that term is counted.

WNBL
The WNBL is the premiere women’s basketball competition in Australia. Unlike the NBL, it does not include a New Zealand team. The problem with one of the teams looked at, the West Coast Waves, is that the name is a rather common phrase and almost none of the video results look relevant to the WNBL team. This type of issue can be a huge problem for women’s (and men) sport when doing promotion and reputation management for the club’s brand beyond the players.

WNCL

The WNCL teams being looked at do not share the name issues that their WNBL counterparts share. Unfortunately, they may suffer a problem with not all results being shown as they often have names with sponsors in them. Official and player content may pull up sponsor named related names. The average fan is less likely to use them as fannish identities are not based around who sponsors them.

Search: Women’s World Cup Soccer
The Matildas are Australia’s national women soccer team. As the W-League is larger than the ANZ Championship, it is not surprising that there is a comparable elevated amount of interest in the team.

Videos: W-League
Only the W-League Canberra United team were checked. Some of the videos for the team had quite a number of views. bebo’s stagnation is quite clear when looking at this data as the number of views for all videos failed to increase between June 3 and November 26.

People: ANZ Championship
The table below includes the demographic data for people who listed ANZ Championship teams as interests on bebo. This data tends to confirm that teams have local interest and don’t have national fan bases.

People: Basketball Australia
The Australian Opals have a similar issue with a few other Australian sport teams: People could use these words but not mean the team. This makes a bit of sense, given that one of the people who list the Opals as an interest is not from Australia.

People: W-League
Some what surprisingly, the people who list a location are not from Canberra. A possible explanation for this is that Sydney bebo users are friends or family of players, who themselves may not be from Canberra.

People: WNBL
Like the ANZ Championship, most fans are from areas near where the team is based. Fans also tend to be young and there is an even mix of male and female fans, which suggests that the WNBL could grow by working to attract that male audience in communities under served by NBL teams.

Related Posts:

• 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 (November 18)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

43 things is a goal setting community found at 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.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

And just to mix it up today and support the idea that I actually do write things, this would be a draft of some methodologies that will be headed into my appendix. A lot of it feels really simple, already gets stated inside existing chapters as I use the data and would eat up word count in my methodology in a really unhealthy way. (I’ve got about 20 of these methodologies to do. I should really do a summary about each particular site I’m using too. We’ll see. This section first.)

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Appendix A
Data Gathering Site Specific Methodologies

43 Things
User information
To get user information from 43 Things, the first step was to identify goals that related to an Australian or New Zealand based sport club.  Searching using various keywords, reading the goals that related to the keywords and determining if they related to the search accomplished this.  Once a goal was identified and people were identified as having completed the goal or intending to complete the goal, the goal was recorded on a row in a 43 Things specific spreadsheet.  In a separate column, the team and league to which the goal related to were also recorded.  After this was completed, the user pages for people with that goal were visited.  Their username, city, state, country, birthday, website, and date joined were all recorded.  The last notation to the row was to include the date that this information was gathered.
During the time that this data was gathered, 43 Things changed the information that was available on the profiles.  This was done sometime between early June 2010 and  early November 2010.  Subsequently information such as city, state, country, birthday, website were not available on user profiles.  Only data gathered prior to this time exists except in cases where the data was checked at a later date and the user’s information had previously been recorded.

Total user information
Attempts were made to benchmark the level of interest in a team by recording the number of relevant search results on 43 things.  This was done by documenting the league and team that were being searched for in a row.  After that, the keyword used for the search was recorded in the same row.  The search was then completed and the total results were recorded.  A textual analysis of the search results was conducted and the total number of relevant results was recorded.  Of those relevant results, the total number of people working to accomplish them was then recorded.  Finally, the date the search was conducted was recorded.

Alexa
Site rankings
A list of websites related to Australian and New Zealand sport was created.  This was recorded on a spreadsheet, with columns that listed the league and team that the domain featured.  For every domain on the list, the page about the domain on Alexa was checked.  The Alexa page URL for the domain was also recorded on the relevant row.  When visiting the page, the world rank was recorded.  If an Australian rank was also available, it was recorded in a separate Australian specific column.  Next, the date that this information was gathered was recorded.  After that, any notes the author had regarding the site were recorded.  This was mostly to identify the type of domain or if it ranked in a country outside Australia.  Lastly, in some cases, the paragraph of information provided by Alexa regarding the site’s traffic and demographics was recorded.

Bebo
User  information
Profile information from bebo users was gathered by running a search related to a specific team or league.  The league and team that the search was related to was documented.  Once this was done, the people search results were copy and pasted to Notepad.  The search results were then formatted for pasting to the bebo user spreadsheet. Once copy and pasted, the author attempted to convert user-inputted locations into real locations of city, state, country.  The location field results were then found in columns for city, state, country instead of a location column.  The columns that existed then were league, team, name, gender, age, city, state, and country.  A final column was added that recorded the date this data was gathered.

Videos, Groups, Band information
There are three different search tabs on bebo beyond people that have information about the community size and audience for Australian and New Zealand sport.  They are Video, Groups and Bands.  Searched related to a specific team, player or league were run.  The relationship between the searches and the league and club were recorded.  The search results were then copy and pasted to Notepad where the results were formatted so they could be pasted on to a separate bebo related spreadsheet.  Once this was done, the following headers where information could be found included type, total (fans/viewers/members), loves, profile views, group created, genre, city, state, country, uploaded, uploader, and description.   The city, state and country information was documented using the same methodology as the bebo profile information.  Finally, a column was added that included the data that this data was gathered on.

Total search results
Total search results data came by recording the search term used, and recording the team and league that connect to that search term.  Once that was done, the total results were recorded for People, Video, Music, Groups, Apps and Skins. The date the search was conducted was then recorded.  Finally, any notes regarding the search or its results were recorded.
When recording the results, in almost all cases, the total results were included.  In a few select cases, generally when the results were 20 or less, the total number of results deemed relevant were recorded.  This was deemed important for smaller sport fan communities where one or two videos or groups may represent the whole community.  An example search where this was done involved a search for “Giants Football Club” because the results picked up rugby league teams and the New York Giants.

BlackPlanet
User information
User information was gathered once a search had been conducted and resulted in a user appearing.  If a user appeared for that search, the league and team related to that search were recorded.  The user name was then recorded.  The user page was then opened and the following data was collected: Country, gender and age. Lastly, the date this information was gathered was documented.

Total user information
To gather total user information, a search phrase was thought of and recorded.  In separate columns, the league and team the search related to were recorded.  The profile search was then conducted and the total number of results were recorded.  Finally, the date the search was conducted on was recorded.

Blogger
User information
User information was gathered once a search had been conducted and resulted in a user appearing.  If a user appeared for that search, the league and team related to that search were recorded.  The user name was then recorded.  The user page was then opened and the following data was collected: Age, Gender, Astrological sign, City, State, Country. Lastly, the date this information was gathered was documented.

Total user information
To gather total user information, a search phrase was thought of and recorded.  In separate columns, the league and team the search related to were recorded.  The profile search was then conducted and the total number of results were recorded.  Finally, the date the search was conducted on was recorded.

Related Posts:

• Socceroos: A creative research data dump (part 1)
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
• The Impact of Jason Akermanis’s Comments on the Western Bulldogs’s Online Fanbase
• Data absent context can change the meaning: Did Julia Gillard hurt the Bulldogs?

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 female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

Yeah, it is that time again! I’ve added about 10 new accounts to this list. They were mostly journalists, people I saw referenced on my Twitter feeds or people that were mentioned in the comments of my previous post. There are a few that where the accounts to have been deleted or otherwise just did not get counted and those are just left off this list rather than be signified with a 0. This is an updated version of Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (version 2), October 4 and October 11, November 11, November 16 and November 18. If I’m missing anyone or anything, let me know.

For probably 99% of these, I have a list of all the person’s followers. If you want to see that information, please let me know and I will be happy to send you the csv with that information.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)