Ozzie Sport

Alexa ranks websites based on worldwide traffic.  If a site is popular in certain countries, it may also be ranked in those countries.  This data is gathered using toolbars that people on the web download and install. Some Australian tech people doubt the accuracy of the numbers for Australia as the toolbar is not widely installed.  Working on this assumption, most of the people in Australia and New Zealand who use the toolbar are people who are involved with online market, search engine optimization or some other group where website rankings matter. (This could be employees of a particular company installing the toolbar so that when they visit a site, it gets more views and thus the rank goes up.)
Still given the toolbar install limitations, Alexa is included to provide another perspective.   In terms of Australian and New Zealand’s women sport, this perspective is tech friendly people’s interest in women’s sport.  This group could be important to attract to as they are more likely to be involved with social media, social bookmarking and other forms of engagement online.
Assuming that Alexa’s toolbar is installed evenly amongst various groups of sport fans, Alexa’s perspective is best in terms of defining interest relative to other teams.  How popular is say netball compared to women’s swimming or basketball or cricket?  Alexa is also useful for determining when interest in a team peaks, and to find out of if this interest over time mirrors when competitions happen and big news is released.
There is a major limitation for using Alexa to gauge the comparative interest in women’s sport and that involves how women’s sport is organized.  In the case of the W-League, the W-League’s official page forwards to the A-League site.  For all teams but the Canberra United, the team pages are embedded inside the site for the men’s team and it is impossible to differentiate traffic between the two.  While this could be seen as good for women’s sport fandom by trying to get audience share from the men, it also is a bit unfair as those pages often aren’t updated as often and do not share equal space and visibility on a site.  Beyond that, it is just impossible to track interest in women’s sport separately and it makes it harder to justify say sponsorship for a women’s club alone.
The Alexa data is broken down by league in order to give a better perspective regarding the comparative performance of each team in the league.

ANZ Championship

Looking at this table, it clearly shows that when the season is going on, there is increased traffic to the site.  Teams do not maintain their traffic levels during the off season.  This data would have been better had it contained information regarding website rank during the Commonwealth Games to see if there was a bump in interest during that period.

Australian Cycling Federation

This table includes both the Australian Cycling Federation and Rachel Neylan, a female Australian cyclist. Interest in Neylan is nowhere near the level of the federation that she’s part of. Her ranking is very low and suggests that she like gets less than a thousand visits a month. In November, interest in her dropped completely off. This is probably because there are not any major competitions which she has taken part in that have occurred in the past three months.

AWIHL

The AWIHL season is currently going on. Most of the teams have their own websites hosted on their own domains. The possible exception is the Melbourne Ice, who are not included. Ice hockey in Australia is a small sport, with a niche audience for both participants and fans, and few facilities when compared to sports like netball and cricket. Opportunities for women are even small. Given these issues, it is not surprising that the team sites do rank at all in Australia and do not rank internationally.

Netball Australia

The domain here is for the netball federation in Australia. It suffers the same issue as the ANZ Championship data: It doesn’t really measure the impact of the Commonwealth Games in terms of traffic. It does demonstrate overall more interest in the national team than in the premiere women’s competition. This likely suggests that support for the national team does not translate into interest in the league. If that is true, it is a fundamental problem for the game that the federation and league should work on.

Netball New Zealand
The table below represents a the Netball New Zealand federation and a local club side that plays in New Zealand. Neither has a rank in New Zealand. Given that, it could be surmised that comparatively speaking, netball is less popular population wise in New Zealand than in Australia. How accurate this is could be debatable as the NRL team for New Zealand often fails to rank inside New Zealand. Alexa may just not be as good in New Zealand as it is in Australia. That said, it looks like Netball New Zealand is more popular now than when the ANZ Championship was going on. This could possibly be a residual effect from the Commonwealth Games, where the Kiwis took gold.

Swimming Australia
Stephanie Rice’s site represents female interest in swimming. Stephanie is active on social networks like Twitter. In September 2010, she was involved in a major controversy for her use of the word faggot on Twitter. In October 2010, she attended a major Australian Rugby Union event. For better or worse, these two events really raised her profile. Data for Swimming Australia is provided in order to give context to Stephanie’s numbers.

Tennis Australia
Tennis Australia is represented here by Sam Stosur. The number of dates information was collected is extremely limited but it suggests that interest peaked during the northern summer, when interest in tennis is at its highest.

W-League
Measuring interest in the W-League using Alexa is difficult. The W-League domain redirects to the A-League page and only the Canberra United have an official site located on their own domain. Contrary to expectations, the start of the W-League season did not result in increased traffic to the United site.

WNCL

The WNCL is the premiere cricket competition for state teams in Australia. Data has only been found for the Victorian Spirit. As the cricket season has gotten underway, the team has seen their traffic increase. Inside Australia, it does not appear to have become a top 100,000 site. Given that cricket is one of the more popular women sports, that they don’t rank higher, is a bit surprising.

Related Posts:

• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)

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 the last of my data dumps from this weekend.  I’ve heard that the penetration of the Alexa toolbar in Australia is really low.  Given that, these numbers are probably less than reliable.  Still, given the absence of other public data, you work with what you have.  This is one of those cases.  Because of some issues, this only includes NRL and AFL urls.  (My actual list is a bit longer and includes more teams.)

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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
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (October 11)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (October 4)

I’m not writing this up as a particularly long post, although I could. I was curious as to the impact that Julia Gillard had on the Western Bulldogs. Her name had been linked with them a lot the day of and after she became Prime Minister. I have a paper that I’m trying to figure out what to do with that shows that Jason Akermanis’s comments regarding how gays should stay in the AFL closet didn’t hurt his team. (Though it could have hurt him. That’s a different story.) The US media also made a big deal of Obama being a White Sox fan and there is some evidence to suggest that his presidency helped the team.

The ways I wanted to determine this were to measure the Alexa traffic for the Western Bulldogs site, the number of followers for Bulldogs related accounts on Twitter, the number of fans for the official page and unofficial fan pages on Facebook, the number of and membership increase for fan pages that mention both Julia Gillard and the Western Bulldogs, possibly demographic differences between the Gillard groups and Buldogs only fanpages, the number of mentions for the Western Bulldogs on bebo, the number of people listing the team as an interest on LiveJournal and its clones, the number of pages mentioning Julia Gillard and the Western Bulldogs on google.com.au, and the number and geographic location of edits to the Western Bulldogs article on Wikipedia.

Some of this data on its own might suggest that Julia Gillard hurt the Bulldogs.  Heck, that was my initial assessment.  One of the Western Bulldogs fan pages on Facebook lost 30 people, an anti-Akermanis group lost two people, a pro-Akermanis group lost two people, the Twitter growth was almost non-existent despite Tweets mentioning Gillard, and the Western Bulldog’s site rank on Alexa for Australia fell almost 2,000 places between the 25th and 26th.  Toss in the fact that the Gillard created communities on Facebook were fewer and had much less growth than the anti-Akermanis over the same period.   All of these appear to be really good indicators that Gillard’s effect on the team online was not a great one.

I really want to draw that conclusion.  I almost think I could make a really strong argument that this is exactly the case.  The problem involves putting this into the context of the rest of the AFL.  The Brisbane Lions don’t appear to have an official Facebook fan page but one of their biggest ones lost 30 members the day after the Bulldogs lost 30 members.  Between June 22 and June 26, only one AFL team hasn’t had their Alexa traffic rank for Australia rise; that is the Melbourne Demons.  For that period, three teams saw a rank drop of over 1,000.  Twitter follow gains are about even for all teams.  Official Facebook fan page growth is also pretty close.  In that context, it is hard to say that Julia Gillard had much impact at all.  In fact, for the Alexa data, the big drop could probably be attributed to the fact that they only had half the teams playing a game for this weekend and the weekend before that.  The impact of Gillard on the growth of the Western Bulldogs just probably isn’t there.

In the wider context, no effect.  In a limited context of the team she barracks for, possible effect.  Which conclusion is the right one?

Related Posts:

• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Australian Hockey League on everything
• New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups

I’ve been busy collecting all sorts of bits of random, creative data for the Socceroos in the lead up to the World Cup.  There is a whole lot more that I want to get but I’ve only so much time.  And time is what is holding up my ability to do an analysis prior to the World Cup regarding what some of this data could mean.  I figured I would share it so that others like you might use it to do your own analysis.  Just a word of caution: Random data is random.

43 Things
This data was checked again on June 12, 2010. These are all the questions where people mentioned Socceroos. They were found by searching 43 Things for Socceroos.

Alexa
I’ve been getting data for other sport teams since early May. It took me a long time to consider adding this one…

Bebo
I wanted an idea as to the demographic make up of fans. Bebo data is often the easiest to get. (And it didn’t close down like it was rumored to have on June 1 if AOL didn’t find a buyer. Yay!) The other benchmark is for the change in total people listing them as an interest or related keyword.

Changes in interest listing on bebo

Black Planet
It isn’t entirely surprising that no one lists the team as an interest on Black Planet.

Blogger
At some point, I will get demographic data off blogger…

Care2
Included the All Whites. They tend to pick up a lot of irrelevant data.

Compete
Tracking your traffic… only limited information, and month by month. If you pay, you get access to better data. I can’t afford it so limited is what you get.

Related Posts:

• Appendix A: Data Gathering Site Specific Methodologies (draft 1)
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)