Ozzie Sport

Wikipedia says that the AHL is Australia’s “premier national domestic field hockey competition. Despite its non-professional nature, AHL is considered one of the strongest and most competitive national field hockey leagues in the world.”  There is a men’s and women’s league.  On the men’s side, the teams include New South Wales Waratahs, NT Stingers, Southern Hotshots, Tassie Tigers, Victoria Vikings, and WA Thundersticks.

Unsurprisingly, no one lists these teams as an interest on blogger, LiveJournal or LiveJournal’s clones.  These are niche teams for a small audience.  The sport isn’t likely to have much international interest.  The league isn’t professional.  The Australian audience on these services isn’t that big or active.  It seems unlikely that they will ever garner a community around them unless some one comes in and brings their own audience for this content.

Related Posts:

• Data dump: Australian sport on YouTube
• Socceroos: A creative research data dump (part 3)
• Adelaide Crows community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger
• Australian Football League on LiveJournal clones like Blurty, Dreamwidth Studios and InsaneJournal

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.

Related Posts:

• ANZ Championship on Facebook’s fanpages and groups
• ANZ Championship on Facebook
• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• eBay.com.au and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport

I’m slowly trying to get through bebo, like I went through blogger.  I didn’t do these communities earlier because on the whole, bebo communities are bigger.  (I’m putting off LiveJournal even longer because they are about the same size as bebo and each individual profile needs to be viewed get year of birth and location.)  This posts looks at the people who list the Canberra Raiders as an interest on bebo.  The Raiders are National Rugby League team that were founded in 1982. On bebo, 83 people list the team as an interest.

Of these 83,  11 are female (13%), 51 are male (61%) and 21  do not list a gender (25%).   44 list their age.  They have an average age of 23.38, median age of 21 and mode of 19.  This is about 10 years younger than their counterparts on blogger where 5 people list their age for a 34 and median age of 32.5.  (This supports and argument made earlier that there may be age related factors for where a team’s fans congregate.)

46 of the 83 list their place of residence.  Most Raiders fans are Australian, with 42 from the country.  In addition, there are 3 fans from New Zealand and 1 from the United Kingdom. 41 of the 42 Australians list a location where their state of residence can be figured out.  20 are from New South Wales, 10 are from the ACT where the Raiders are based, 9 are from Queensland, 1 is from Victoria and 1 is from Western Australia. The 10 people from the ACT are the largest total following of any team on any network that I have examined so far.  The second closest total is 5 for the Cronulla Sharks on LiveJournal.  Of the 20 from New South Wales, several are from towns outside Sydney where they might do not have an NRL team.  They include one person each from  Batemans Bay, Dubbo, Gilgandra, Harden, Tullibigeal and Stockton, and two from Tumut.  That representation inside New South Wales lends a bit more of a regional feel than if just the ACT is looked at though that much (17 total if Stockon, north of Sydney, is ignored).  The problem with the ACT is the population tends to sometimes view itself as more transient than in other parts of the country.  This could imply that the team should have a wider fan base as people take their love of the team with them when they leave… or more narrow as people who are fans only become fans and only maintain their fannishness for a team while they live in the ACT.  It is hard to tell.

Related Posts:

• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
• Wests Tigers on blogger

The Sydney based Balmain Tigers were part of the National Rugby League and their predecessor, the New South Wales Rugby League.  The team folded in 1999, when they merged with the Western Suburbs Magpies to form the Wests Tigers.  According to Roy Morgan Research, the Wests Tigers are the sixth most popular NRL team in Australia.  This could go a long way towards explaining the comparably large size of the Balmain Tigers fandom on bebo, when compared to other defunct teams such as Gold Coast Chargers, Gold Coast Giants, Gold Coast Seagulls, Illawarra Steelers, Newcastle Rebels, Newtown Jets, North Sydney Bears, Perth Reds, St. George Dragons, Western Reds, and Western Suburbs Magpies.

The number of people listing the Balmain Tigers as an interest on bebo is 11.  The only defunct team with more is St. George Dragons, which has the problem of picking up the current merged name for the St. George Dragons and Illawarra Steelers.  The Newtown Jets as close with 10 people.

The community listing the team as an interest on bebo is mostly male at 64%, with 7 people identifying as male, 3 as female and 1 not identifying.   For Sydney based teams where there are more than 10 fans, Sydney FC and the West Tigers both have a large male audience with 78 and 70% respectively.  (No other Sydney based team so far has more than 10 fans where gender data is available.)   For NRL teams with 10 or more people listing a team as an interest where I have data (see older posts), with the exception of the West Tigers, the other teams all have smaller male audiences: Brisbane Broncos on bebo with 40% male (and 30% unidentified), and Brisbane Broncos on blogger with 58% male.

Only seven of the eleven list their location so that their state and country can be identified.  Of these seven, all are from New South Wales and Australia.

Balmain Tigers fans are older than other NRL and Sydney based teams for which I have data.  Their average age, amongst the five who list their age, is 40.4 with a median age of 43.   For the both categories, the next closest community in age is the Parramatta Eels one on blogger, with an average age of 35.8 and five people listing their age.

The defunct Balmain Tigers have their fans who refuse to give up on their loyalty. Based on bebo, we can guess that they are older, male and local to where the team played.  If there were international fans of a team 10 years gone, those international fans aren’t as interested in expressing their interest in the team.  These patterns make some sense, especially if you factor in the potential for their to be rugby and NRL historians in there.  New South Wales is a base for the sport and the NRL with its major population center.  If there were other fans outside the original core, they would probably be based there.

Related Posts:

• 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)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

Adelaide United are a team in the A-League and are based in Adelaide, South Australia.  There are 75 people who list Adelaide United as an interest on bebo.   This puts them at about the middle of the pack for number of fans, if they had been in the AFL.  One of the rather unique characteristics of this community compared to some of the other sites we’ve looked at is that group membership is far larger than the number of people listing the team as an interest.

On bebo, 43 or 57% of the fans do not list a gender.   Of the rest, 26 or 35% identify as male and 6 or 8% identify as female.  The huge number of people who do not list gender make it hard to compare to other A-League teams where we have gender related data.   Only the Wellington Phoenix community on blogger comes close with unknown gender, and that’s with 33% with gender not listed.  For Adelaide based teams where we have data, the Adelaide Thunderbirds have 50% with gender unlisted but the community size is two.

There are 18 people who list their age.   Of these, the average age is 20.1, median age is 19 and mode is 20.  This makes them younger than the Adelaide United, Melbourne Victory, Newcastle Jets, Perth Glory, Sydney FC, Wellington Phoenix communities on blogger.  The team closest in age to them is the Melbourne Victory community on blogger, with an average age of 22.8 based on a population of seven.   The next closet community is the Adelaide United community on blogger, at 26 and a population of two.  That’s a difference of almost six years.  (Some of this likely attributed to the fact that bebo tends to skew to a younger audience than blogger.)   The Adelaide team based community is a bit younger than United, but some of this is because the population size is one: Adelaide Thunderbirds on blogger has one fan who is 18 years old and Port Adelaide Power on blogger has one fan who is 15.

The community is overwhelming based in Australia, with 21 of the 75 people listing their country being from the country. No other countries are represented.   This contrasts a bit with the Adelaide United community on blogger, where one person is from China.   This Australian community is also overwhelming from the state that the team plays in, with 19 of the 20 people listing a state being from South Australia.  The other one is from Western Australia.   Of the South Australians, a few are from outside Adelaide with one person each from Barmera, Hallett Cove, and Roseworthy.  This pattern of loyalties for a team being very regional, to the state, is one that exists across the A-League where I have data from blogger.  This may be partially a result of the league not having aged enough for people to take their loyalties with them as they move, or a lack of stars moving from team to team with fans taking their player loyalty with them.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (November 7)
• 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’ve finished tallying the number of fans by team for blogger.  The following chart is sorted by most popular teams first, least popular teams last.

Australian Sports Fandom on Blogger

What I didn’t find all that surprising was the dominance of AFL teams at the top.   They have eight of the twelve spots for teams with double digit fans on their service.   Of the remaining four spots, two are for the A-League and two are for the NRL.  The presence of the A-League feels a bit surprising as I didn’t think that soccer was that popular in Australia, at least compared to the NRL.  I do recall a fair amount of advertising for the A-League and they are beginning to build more soccer purpose built stadiums in Australia.

For the 28 teams with 1 to 9 fans, all are from the NRL, AFL or A-League with the exception of the Melbourne Phoenix  who played in the Commonwealth Bank Trophy.  I am a bit surprised that some of the more popular netball teams on Facebook, Twitter and bebo didn’t make the list for blogger.   I’m not surprised that other leagues didn’t make the list as most of these leagues are for secondary sports.

There are 227 total listings for people who list a team as an interest.  (There may be duplicates, where a person lists more than one team as an interest.)  Of the population, 144 or 63% identify themselves as male, 63 or 28% identify themselves as female and 20 or 9% do not identify a gender.  This feels in line with how sports fandom tends to be depicted when looked at by gender: Male dominant but with a growing female demographic.

Of the 227, only 154 listed their birthdate and had their astrological sign displayed.   The distribution amongst various astrological signs is pretty even with the smallest representation at 7 or 5% for Taurus and the largest at 17 or 11% for Pisces.   The distribution for specific teams is much less even, but much of this can be attributed to the small sample size.

142 of he 227 list their age when problematic ages, like 253, are removed.  The oldest fans are those for the Richmond Tigers, who average 41.6 years.  This community is small though, with only three people listing their age.  The Parramatta Eels have the oldest average age for a team with five or more people who list their age.  Their average age is 35.8.   The NRL and AFL are evenly distributed for teams with the oldest fans.  Penrith Panthers has the youngest average fan age at 18, but the population size is only one.  For a team with five or more people listing them as an interest, the Melbourne Victory win with an average age of  22.8.

167 fans list an Australian state of residence.  (There may be more Australian in this sample but they don’t necessarily list their state.)   The most popular state for sports fans on blogger listing an Australian team as an interest in New South Wales, with 62 people.  Victoria is second with 43.   Queensland is third with 28.  Western Australia is fourth with 15.  South Australia is fifth with 11.  The ACT has 5, Tasmania has 2 and the Northern Territory has 1.  In the ACT, the most popular team is the Brisbane Lions with 2 fans.  In New South Wales, Syndey FC is the most popular team with 16 fans.  The Roosters are the second most popular with 7 fans, which is a pretty big difference between the most popular and second most popular teams.  The Collingwood Magpies are the most popular team in the Northern Territory with 1 fan.  The Brisbane Lions are the most popular team in Queensland with 7 fans.  The Broncos are the second most popular with 4 fans.  The Adelaide Crows are the most popular team in South Australia with 8 fans.  The only other team listed as an interest by people listing the state as their place of residence were Adelaide United of the A-League.  No NRL team interested people from that state.  From Tasmania, 1 person listed the Geelong Cats as an interest and 1 person listed the Richmond Tigers as an interest.  In Victoria, the Collingwood Magpies were the most popular team with 12 people listing them as an interest.  The second most popular team with 7 fans was Melbourne Victory.  In Western Australia, there are two most popular teams: Fremantle Dockers and Perth Glory with 5 fans each. There is no second most popular team.  The other five people from the state evenly distribute their interest with one fan for five teams.  I don’t feel well enough informed at this point to know if this reflects on existing regional sports fandom patterns.

Related Posts:

• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (November 7)

This post looks at the size of the Wests Tigers community on blogger.  The Wests Tigers are a Sydney based National Rugby League team.  The team is relatively new, having been founded in 2000 as a merger of the Balmain Tigers and the Western Suburbs Magpies.

So far, the only other NRL team on blogger that has been looked at is the Brisbane Broncos.  That team has 12 people who listed them as an interest.  In comparison, the Wests Tigers have ten people who list them as an interest.  That they are so close is a bit surprising as Roy Morgan Research indicates that the fanbase for the Wests Tigers is substantially smaller than that of the Broncos.

Of the ten West Tigers fans, seven are from Australia, one from New Zealand, one from the United Kingdom and one who does not identify their country of origin.  Compared to other NRL teams, the percentage of Australians is low: 100% of Brisbane Broncos fans on blogger and Dreamwidth are all Australian, 100% of Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal are Australians, 85.7% of Canterbury Bulldogs fans on LiveJournal are Australian, 81.1% of Broncos fans on LiveJournal are Australian.  Of the networks and teams sampled, only the Broncos community on bebo has a smaller percentage, 71.1%, of Australians.

Of the Australians, three are from Queensland and three are from New South Wales.  This makes as these states are strong holds of Rugby League.  Added to that, Melbourne and Sydney have traditionally had a rivalry so you wouldn’t necessary expect a Victorian fan population.

The astrological sign data is really interesting and would be more interesting if it the samples were larger to see if some sort of statement could be made about a team’s fanbase.  That said, six people list their date of birth for Blogger to calculate their astrological sign.  Three are Leos, and with one person being a Cancer, Capricorn and Pisces.

Seven of the ten fans list their age, with two of these being obviously incorrect; a person cannot be 253 years old.   If those two are ignored, the average age of a Wests Tigers fan on blogger is 28.8 and a median age of 22.  This average makes the team’s fans older than some of the other NRL team fans on networks that I’ve looked at including Broncos fans on bebo and LiveJournal,  Canterbury Bulldogs fans on LiveJournal and Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal.  The only team and network with a higher average is the Broncos community on blogger.  The above average age compared to other fan populations may end up being a result of people self selecting networks based on age: the youngest fans prefer bebo, fans in their mid 20s prefer LiveJournal and older fans prefer blogging.  As we age or as a result of a generational gap, we might prefer going from shorter method of communicating to a longer one.

Seven people list their gender as male, two as female and one does not identify their gender.  This is higher percentage of male fans than  the Broncos on either bebo or blogger.

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
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)

Based on the somewhat data I have so far from Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and its clones, blogger and bebo, the Melbourne Victory are one of the most popular teams in Australia.  They are only behind Collingwood Magpies, Carlton Blues, and the  Queensland Maroons.  A lot of this is attributed to the 46,620 people who list the team as an interest on Facebook and 1,432 people following the team on Twitter.

So far, only 28 teams have been looked at on blogger and here, the Victory fall in the middle of the pack with only 11 people listing them as an interest.  Most of the sampling on the network has involved the AFL and Queensland based teams.  Teams ahead of the Victory include Sydney Swans, Collingwood Magpies, West Coast Eagles, Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Lions, Geelong Cats, and the Western Bulldogs.

What does this small community look like?  Of the eleven, nine list their country of residence.   Of these nine, eight are Australians and one is likely an Australian who is currently traveling the United States.   Of the nine Australians, seven list their state of origin and they are all from Victoria, six listing Melbourne as their home and one listing St. Kilda as theirs.  This is a team that draws, at least on blogger, from where it is based and does not have a larger, national following.

Seven people list their age.  For mean, median and mode, age is the same: 22.  This is a relatively young fan community, especially when compared to a few of the AFL team communities on blogger.  The community is also a more likely to be male with 6 people identifying as male, 3 identifying as female and 2 not identifying.  Between the Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Bullets, Brisbane Lions, Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies, Essendon Bombers, Fremantle Dockers, Geelong Cats, Hawthorn Hawks, Melbourne Demons, and North Melbourne Kangaroos communities, only the Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies and Geelong Cats communities have a smaller female fanbase.

It will be interesting to see how this community eventually compares to other A-League teams on the network.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• 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)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups

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.

More editing: I normally tried variations of a team’s name for Facebook to make sure I get the highest number.  In the case of St. George Illawarra Dragons, I goofed and got the one that listed 240.  When I used St Geoergillawarra Dragons combed with St. George Illawarra Dragons, I got 9,200.  This change will show up in any future data analysis.  The collection date has always been changed to today just so I know when I got that number.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• 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 athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (November 7)

This post is a series of posts looking at the size of Australian sports leagues on LiveJournal, its clones and other social networks. Earlier posts include Australian Football League on JournalFen , Australian Football League community on DeadJournal , National Rugby League on DeadJournal and JournalFen,  Australian Football League on LiveJournal clones like Blurty, Dreamwidth Studios and InsaneJournal, Adelaide Crows community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger,and Official Australian Football League Twitter accounts and follower population by country. and Brisbane Lions community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger. Methodology for this post has been discussed in earlier posts.

Brisbane has a number of professional sports team including the Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Lions, Queensland Maroons, Brisbane Roar, Brisbane Bullets (defunct), Queensland Reds, Queensland Bulls, Queensland Blades, Queensland Firebirds, Queensland Rams and Queensland Sundevils.  For all but two of these teams, the Blades and Rams, there is some small community on one of the following social networks: bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and its clones, Twitter.  If Twitter is excluded, the Broncos have the largest community with 333 people interested in them and the Sundevils the smallest with 1 person interested in them.

What does the Brisbane sports team fandom look like? Half (54%) the Australian community is based out of Queensland and about a quarter (28%) is based in New South Wales.  The rest is distributed amongst the other states, with the exception of Tasmania which has no Brisbane fans for any sports.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)