I looked at the most popular teams on Facebook for the AFL. Now it is time for the NRL. The following is based on the official Facebook pages that are linked on a team’s official site. If a team is not listed, it is because they did not provide a link to their official Facebook page or provided a bad link. This data was gathered on April 6, 2010.
Yesterday, I made a post about the most popular Australian athlete, league and team related Twitter accounts.
On Twitter, @anthonyalsop pointed me to a list of Australian athletes on Twitter he had created. I had missed quite a few on his list and some of those accounts led me to lists where I found additional athletes, teams and leagues. All told, I added about 61 new rows of data. There are a few repeats from yesterday’s list as I updated some numbers. (Historical twitter growth for athletes would be interesting to look at and there are tools for just that. It is a project for a different day. Maybe.) There doesn’t appear to be much change.
Things to remember with this list: It does not include athletes who do not play for team based sports. Swimmers, golfers, tennis players, surfers and race car drivers are not on the list. It also does not include Australian athletes playing for teams outside of Australia. This includes cyclists (who are probably the most popular Australian athletes that I can find) as they often compete for teams outside Australia. It does not include Australian NBA and WNBA players. It also does not include retired Australian athletes, unless they are now involved in a management role with a specific team. National teams are included but players are generally sorted by their other playing affiliation. This list does include athletes and teams from outside Australia when the league has teams from other countries. Thus, South Africa is represented with its Super 14 teams and New Zealand is included with a variety of teams in leagues such as the NRL, Super 14 and the NBL.
Updated this list on the 11th to include the Australian Opals thanks to a comment by @SportingSheilas.
An updated version of this list can be found at Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
This is sorted by total number of followers. If an account is tagged (unofficial), it indicates that it is not the official account; it belongs to management, a player or a fansite. The list includes teams from most of the major sports leagues in Australia. Teams that play in those leagues that are not from Australia have also been included. Players were only counted as belonging to a team if they currently play for it. (Some players that are on NRL player lists have gone to play in Europe. They aren’t included.) The date that the information was collected is also included as these numbers actively change over time. If some one/team/organization is listed twice, it is because the data was collected on multiple dates.
The New South Wales Blues are first class cricket team based at the Sydney Cricket Grounds. According to Wikipedia, they compete in most of the major cricket tournaments in the country. There is a small community interested in the team on LiveJournal and its clones with 17 people list the NSW Blues as an interest and 2 on JournalFen. This isn’t particularly big for LiveJournal, 101 people list the Sydney Swans as an interest and 100 people list the West Coast Eagles as an interest in comparison. The teams sits between the Carlton Blues at 18 and the Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks at 16.
Of the two people on JournalFen, only one lists their year of birth: 1975. Of the 17 on LiveJournal, ten list their year of birth. On LiveJournal, the mean year of birth is 1986.4, median is 1987.5 and mode of 1992. This is pretty close to the Sydney based Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs community on LiveJournal where mean is 1985 and median is 1987. No other Sydney based teams where I have this data for other networks are as close to the team age wise.
Most fans are Australian with both JournalFen people listing the country as their place of residence and 14 of the 17 on LiveJournal being from Australia. Of the other three, one does not list a country, one is from Canada and one is from New Zealand. Of the Australians on JournalFen, one is from New South Wales and one is from the ACT. On LiveJournal, 2 are from the ACT, 8 are from New South Wales and 2 are from Victoria. All but one of the people from New South Wales list themselves as being from Sydney; the one who doesn’t is from Gosford, which isn’t that far from Sydney.
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.
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.
I’ve not really spent much time looking for fan communities for Australian sports teams on Facebook. This is for a couple of reasons. First, the data from Facebook’s Advertising Target Selection is often subject to wild fluctuations in the course of small periods of time. In the case of one search, there was a 200 person drop in ten minutes on a sample size of about 3,000. That’s pretty significant and calls into question all the data. The second reason is that it is hard to get data out of Facebook’s Advertising Target Selection. For LiveJournal, bebo and blogger, I might not be able to get all a user’s info but I have enough that I can easily tell you that the average Northern Territory fan of a team is this age. I can identify specific individuals and in some cases make educated guesses about the reliability of the data. With Facebook, all I get is a number based on the selection. If I want to find out how many female fans there of the Brisbane Lions from Queensland, I have to make a number of selections to get that number. (But I only get that based on city for Facebook, not state.) If I want to find out how many male fans there are, I have to go back to Facebook and make another series of selections. I can’t do that with in the context of my own data set compiled / exported from Facebook. This makes it really impossible to compile a complete listing of data in a timely manner. If I want to find out how many 18 year olds are fans of the Canberra Raiders, I have to make that selection one at a time. Aggravating.
Still, I wanted an idea of what is going on with Australia’s sports fandom on Facebook in terms of location and demographics. What I thus have is a load of random data. (Random data is random.) I tended to focus on cities and teams, with both chosen mostly at random. I can’t find an easy way to display or map this so the table is located below for you to look at.
Before that, some things I found interesting in this data:
Edited to add on January 9, 2010: 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.
