Ozzie Sport

Unlike my AFL dataset for foursquare, this one is a bit incomplete. I was missing at least two stadiums and for the first week I looked at, there might have been checkins not related to the game as there were four days between the time I recorded the data. I just wasn’t completely trusting of that for a venue that I didn’t think was single use.

That said, these are the games that I have recorded:

When that is broken down by team, it looks like:

NRL fans are appear to be less likely to check in to events. In one case, the venue where games are played is not even listed on Foursquare. The venue issue here appears differently than the AFL where at least two venues are actively promoting foursquare on social media sites like Twitter and encouraging people who attend games to checkin in order to get a swarm badge.

Non-mixed use facilities and facilities that are not shared with the AFL are also likely to have fewer seats with lower average attendance than the AFL. This could be a secondary factor for why there are fewer checkins. Another reason could be that adoption rates for foursquare are higher in Victoria than they are for New South Wales.

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
• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• Data dump: Australian sport on bebo

I’m not going to check foursquare daily to see how many checkins there were but I thought it might be useful historical data to have some benchmarks for how many people checked in over the course of a few days when one or two games might have been played at a venue.

In going back through my list, I’ve found a couple of things sort of worth noting:

• MCG at http://foursquare.com/venue/2141884 was merged with http://foursquare.com/venue/281644 around April 30/May 1.  The first url forwards to the second. http://foursquare.com/venue/480417 , http://foursquare.com/venue/2947320 and http://foursquare.com/venue/2618227 had the same issue.
• Etihad Stadium had a merge of http://foursquare.com/venue/2396681 with http://foursquare.com/venue/306196
• One venue lost a checkin and person.  I believe this was at Suncorp.
• Canberra Stadium name changed to Bruce Stadium on Foursquare. URL remains the same.
• More first time checkins to Melbourne Demons game, more visitors to St. Kilda at Etihad Stadium.  Some of this could be a result of a merge of another foursquare venue with it.

It should be easy enough for some one with some skill to automate this data to check how many daily updates there are.  (Which could be a nifty API…)  If such a tool exists already, please point me at it.  If you’re interested in building one specifically for this sort of thing, I’d love to know about it.

I’m not particularly interested in doing analysis this morning.  Instead, I’ve provided a table of my foursquare data I have so far.  If you use it for your own analysis, I’d appreciate a link back.

Related Posts:

• NRL ovals, fields and stadiums on foursquare
• AFL stadiums, fields and ovals on FourSquare
• The NRL on Foursquare
• Foursquare and the AFL

In my previous post, I looked at the number of checkins on foursquare at AFL facilities. This time, I’m looking at NRL facilities. The list of stadiums I’ve included are based on austadiums’s list. I love data like this for several reasons.

First, it helps to give an idea of the size of specific fan communities and their engagement with social media. (Though Foursquare doesn’t indicate true size of a social media community for a team. Some groups just trend towards certain sites and services. Universal statements are dumb and often wrong. Give me an unfounded statement and I will happily see if I can drive a truck through it.)

Next, Foursquare is probably one of the better services out there, outside of a team’s own mobile applications through app providers like Apple and their own analytics regarding browser usage, for getting an idea as to the size of the community using mobile devices and if this group is worth targeting.

Third, foursquare can give an idea as to the geographic distribution of a league’s fanbase who use mobile devices. This can then be compared to other geographic patterns on sites like blogger, bebo, LiveJournal and facebook. You’re not necessarily getting information on where fans live but you could begin to do an interesting analysis on patterns of what fans do and where their geographic center is. This could be interesting because for some teams, they share a facility in a larger city. A lot of fans will list their location as say Melbourne, where the actual core of Melbourne is about one square mile. People just chose to list that, instead of say St. Kilda.

That out of the way, the table below is sorted by the number of total checkins. The top facility not shared by the AFL is Sydney Football Stadium. It is also the top non-shared AFL/NRL facility. Suncorp Stadium is the next biggest non-shared use facility. It too is an NRL facility. Brunswick St Oval is actually the first non-shared use AFL facility and 98 checkins. The next two non-shared use facilities are also AFL. In either case, I felt kind of surprised that the NRL facilities had as many checkins as they did. I was under the impression that rugby league country was not as into the social media scene as areas dominated by the AFL.

Related Posts:

• Notes on AFL/NRL foursquare sporting venues in Australia
• AFL stadiums, fields and ovals on FourSquare
• The NRL on Foursquare
• Foursquare and the AFL