Posts Tagged brisbane bullets

NBL on Twitter

Posted by Laura on Monday, 8 March, 2010

I have spent about three hours looking through various lists to find official NBL twitter accounts, NBL fansites, and accounts for NBL management and players.  NBL lists on Twitter are a bit different than comparable lists for say the A-League and even the Claxton Shield.  They contain a lot more fans of a team, players that used to play in the NBL  (but have gone to Europe or the US), sports management students, and journalists.  It looks like if you mention the NBL, some people will add you to the list.   To make sure I found actual player accounts on those lists, I compared names on accounts to the NBL player list and the Wikipedia player list.

I recorded if it was the official team account, or an unofficial account.  Unofficial accounts are player, management or fansite accounts.  I also recorded the number of followers an account had.  Who are the most popular players on Twitter?  What are the most popular teams?

Team Account Date collected Total followers
Adelaide 36ers Adelaide36ers 8-Mar-10 908
Melbourne Tigers Follow24Hodge (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 612
Wollongong Hawks wollongonghawks 6-Mar-10 572
New Zealand Breakers johnrillie (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 474
Perth Wildcats perthwildcats 6-Mar-10 457
South Dragons Joeingles7 (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 431
Melbourne Tigers Wortho33 (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 285
Wollongong Hawks milisimic (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 272
Townsville Crocodiles TsvCrocs 6-Mar-10 259
Perth Wildcats nickmarvin (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 251
Townsville Crocodiles chomicide (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 237
Cairns Taipans Dusty_Rychart (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 234
New Zealand Breakers oscarforman (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 177
Perth Wildcats TheRealSchensh (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 154
Townsville Crocodiles rustyhinder (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 153
Adelaide 36ers jgovereasy (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 110
Adelaide 36ers DarrenNg8 (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 86
Townsville Crocodiles JoshJenkins24 (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 72
Adelaide 36ers BenFitz (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 62
Adelaide 36ers 36ers (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 51
Sydney Kings sydneykings 8-Mar-10 43
Townsville Crocodiles Kegs42 (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 38
Townsville Crocodiles willo43 (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 35
Gold Coast Blaze Vandy21 (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 33
Wollongong Hawks danjackson9 (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 32
Townsville Crocodiles ToffCedar (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 17
Townsville Crocodiles cameronwhiting (unofficial) 6-Mar-10 13
Adelaide 36ers brad_393 (unofficial) 8-Mar-10 5

One thing that surprised me was that not every team had an official account.  It seems like they should have one, if only to squat on it to protect their future potential assets.

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NBL on Facebook

Posted by Laura on Wednesday, 10 February, 2010

I’m still looking at the NBL and this time, I’m looking at people interested in the teams on Facebook.   Today, using the Create Ad page, I set the variables for all with the exception of the country.  That I set for Australia.  I got the following table:

NBL on Facebook

League Interest Facebook
NBL Adelaide 36ers 2,200
NBL Brisbane Bullets 0
NBL Cairns Taipans 0
NBL Gold Coast Blaze 0
NBL Melbourne Tigers 0
NBL New Zealand Breakers 0
NBL Perth Wildcats 2,020
NBL Townsville Crocodiles 0
NBL Wollongong Hawks 0

There aren’t any particular patterns here that can be readily explained such as higher interest in teams from non-major leagues existing outside of Victoria, Queensland and New South Wales.  (Melbourne’s A-League team is first, with Adelaide in second, Sydney in third, Perth in fourth and Brisbane in fifth.)

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Brisbane Bullets on Yahoo!Groups

Posted by Laura on Tuesday, 9 February, 2010

Like the Adelaide 36ers, there is one group on Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the Brisbane Bullets: BrisbaneBullets.  It was created on March 2, 2007 and has three members. It can be found in the Australia category. Unlike the 36ers list, this group has some posting, the first of which was made on November 4, 2008.  Sadly, all this activity is spam related from two people.  It looks like the founder never posted.

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Melbourne Victory on blogger

Posted by Laura on Wednesday, 13 January, 2010

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.

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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.

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.

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Brisbane’s sports community on LiveJournal and clones, bebo, blogger and Twitter

Posted by Laura on Tuesday, 5 January, 2010

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.

Map of Brisbane sports fandom by state and team

Rugby is traditionally more popular than footy in Queensland.   The distribution in Queensland suggests something a bit different, with 89 total fans for the Lions versus 83 for the Broncos.  Rugby and the Broncos are more popular only in New South Wales than footy and the Lions. One exception exists for the ACT where there are three fans for each.

Bearing in mind that people can be counted twice if they are one more than one network and are fans of more than one team, Brisbane sports fandom where the Australian state is known has the the largest interest base on bebo, with 272 people using it.  Next is LiveJournal with 62 users, Blogger with 20, Blurty with 2 and InsaneJournal with 1.  Brisbane fans in the ACT are more likely to use LiveJournal (3) with bebo (2) and blogger (2) being their next most popular choices.  Victorian fans of Brisbane teams just prefer bebo (11) to LiveJournal (10) with their third choice being blogger. (2)  In all other cases, bebo is the top choice in every state for Brisbane sports fans.  Outside of Queensland, no other fans use or used blurty or InsaneJournal.

There is an international interest in Brisbane sports teams.  This ranges from 0 to 50% of the total community that lists their country of origin.  Communities with 50% of their support base outside Australia include the Queensland Red community on bebo, and the Brisbane Roar community on bebo.  In both these cases, the community is 4 and 2 people respectively.  33.3% of the 30 member strong Queensland Maroons community on bebo comes from outside Australia, with 8 people from New Zealand and 2 from the Cook Islands. 32.4% of the Twitter followers of the Brisbane Broncos are from outside Australia with 13 from China, 68 from Great Britain and 286 from the United States. 28.9% of the Brisbane Broncos on bebo comes outside Australia with 32 people from New Zealand, 10 from Papau New Guinea, 6 from the United States, 2 from Fiji, the Philippines and Tonga.   The Queensland Reds unofficial Twitter follow list has 28.6% of its followers from outside the US. 50 followers are the US, 36 from Great Britain, 9 from Brazil and New Zealand, and 4 from Denmark and Italy.

bebo, Blogger and LiveJournal all allow users to display their age on their profiles.   This can help develop a picture of the age of the a team’s community online.  There is a small problem in that not everyone lists their age and these populations are very, very small.  Thus, this data cannot be really used to extrapolate beyond the specific community unless there is some other evidence to support that.

For the Brisbane Broncos community on blogger, the average age is 33, median is 31, mode is 20 with 9 of 12 people listing their ages.  This is not close to LiveJournal’s Broncos community which has an average age of 25, median age of 27 and mode age of 20 with 13 of 42 people listing their age.  The bebo community is much younger than both with an average age of 23, median age of 20 and mode age of 19 with 127 of 278 people listing their age.  For the lions, 49 people list their page on bebo with an average age of 24.5, median age of 21, mode age of 18.  On blogger, 10 Lions fans list their age.  They have a average ago of 33, median age of 30 and mode age of 27.  For LiveJournal Lions fans,  17 list their age.  They have an average age of 26, and a median and mode age of 24.  Only one other group, Queensland Maroons on bebo, have more than 10 fans who list their ages.  In that group, 21 list their ages, with an average age of 21.9, median age of 20 and mode age of 20.

Bebo and blogger both allow users to publicly display their gender.  The team and network with the highest percentage of male fans involves the Queensland Reds on bebo, where all six individuals list their gender as male.  The next highest percentage of male in the community include the Brisbane Bulls on bebo and the Queensland Bulls on bebo.  In both cases, the percentage of males is 60%.  In the case of the Brisbane Bulls,  40% or 2 people do not list a gender.  For the Queensland Bulls,  20% or one person lists identifies as female and the other did not list a gender.  The highest percentage of female members is the Queensland Bulls on blogger with 50% but that community only has two members.  The next highest percentage is for the Brisbane Broncos community on blogger at 42% or five people identifying as female.  All other members of that community identify as male.   The Brisbane Lions community on blogger has a female percentage at 38, with 6 people identifying as female.  56% of the members identify as male and 6%, or one person, do not list a gender.  The highest percentage of unknown/unlisted gender is for the Queensland Sundevils bebo community, which only has one person and they don’t identify their gender.  After that is the Brisbane Roar community on bebo, where 69% or 11 people do not identify their gender, 4 people identify as male and 1 identifies as female.  The Brisbane Lions community on bebo has 40% unknown/unlisted with 53 people not including their gender. 36% of the Lions bebo community identifies as male and 24% identifies as female.

This isn’t the best write up, mostly just summarizing some of the data.    The rest of the data used for this post will show up in future posts.  As I learn more, I’m planning on integrating more analysis of what this data means.

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