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.
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.
