Ozzie Sport

This post is part of a series looking at the AFL fandom on Yahoo!Groups.  It focuses on providing general historical information about these groups: When they were founded and activity levels.  For a critique of the problems on Yahoo!Groups in getting demographic information, read Sydney Swans on Yahoo!Groups and The AFL on Yahoo!Groups.

This post is about the Yahoo!Group’s Essendon Bombers community.The Essendon Bombers directory on Yahoo!Groups has twenty-one mailing lists.  Of these, fifteen are actually about the Essendon Bombers.  The lists are ultimateessendonbombersclub, bombersrule, essendonsofficialyah00club, marksessendonfansroom, essendonunknownandforgotten, bombers4eva, gobombers, thewindyhillbombers, bombersofficialyah00club, the-bombers, babybombers, essendonbombers, ihopeessendonchoke, thebomberfanclub, and essendon.  Of these, three have never had any real activity (essendonunknownandforgotten, bombersofficial, and the-bombers), two have had one post (essendonsofficialyah00club, essendon) and six others have had fewer than ten posts (bombersrule, marksessendonfansroom,   gobombers, thewindyhillbombers, ihopeessendonchoke, thebomberfanclub).  Two were created in 1999, eight were created in 2000, four were created in 2001 and one was created in 2007.

I  added real posting from the lists together and created the following chart:

This community was active between June 1999 and October 2002.  After that, the community basically died off with almost no posting.  This period between 1999 and 2001 was one where the team had performed rather well.   In 2000, the team won 20 games in a row.  After that, the team did not perform as well.  Compared to the other teams looked at, this pattern is a bit weird because of the drop off after 2002.  The total volume, both in terms of total mailing lists and total posts, is also different.  It makes that drop off all the more fascinating.  The drop off in activity may possibly relate to other factors, such as the small size of the community on LiveJournal clones that were most active in the period immediately as this community went inactive.  It will be interesting to compare the community creation dates on bebo and LiveJournal, to see if the population may have shifted towards those sites.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
• Australian Hockey League on everything

There is a directory for Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the Australian Football League.   There are 276 lists found in it.   There are an additional 195 listed in the Clubs and Team subcategory.  And then there are the following counts for team specific subcategories:

• · Adelaide Crows (7)
• · Brisbane Lions (22)
• · Carlton Blues (13)
• · Collingwood Magpies (11)
• · Essendon Bombers (21)
• · Fremantle Dockers (5)
• · Geelong Cats (5)
• · Hawthorn Hawks (17)
• · Melbourne Demons (7)
• · North Melbourne Kangaroos (10)
• · Port Adelaide Power (10)
• · Richmond Tigers (15)
• · St. Kilda Saints (5)
• · Sydney Swans (14)
• · West Coast Eagles (8)
• · Western Bulldogs (10)

It is possible to get data from some of these lists if you either join them or member data is public.  (scrapheap_afl for instance has 25 members and hasn’t been updated since August 2009.   Eight people list their ages with an average age of 38. Eight people list their country.  Two are from Australia, two are from the United Kingdom and four are from the United States.  Nine people list their gender and all are male.)  For mailing lists that require joining to get the information, most of them have open membership.  Spammers than join and post unrelated, offtopic spam.  This spam problem thus makes the data very suspect.  The number of communities is also suspect because there are several instances of incorrect categorization.  For instance, there is an Indian department soccer team grouped in the Western Bulldogs category.

If we were looking for a reason to use this data, it might be best used for historical purposes: When were these communities created and when were they most active?  When did they go inactive?  This data would have to be currated manually as the suspect groups would need to be removed and periods of high spam posts would need to identified.  Hopefully, in the next day or so, I can provide some data that has the creation dates of Yahoo!Groups to help begin to analyze these patterns.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)

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:

• Brisbane Roar’s male fans are double the amount of their female counter parts.
• Brisbane Roar fans also to be single with 420 married compared to 180 married.
• The Perth Wildcats don’t have a fanbase in the Northern Territory or Tasmania.
• Queensland Maroons have 40 fans in Rockhampton, Queensland compared to the 8,100 fans they have in Sydney.
• New Zealand’s Canterbury Crusaders have the same fan community size, 80, in Sydney as the do in Cranbourne.
• The Melbourne Vixens are the only netball team to be listed as an interest from the Tasman ANZ Championship teams.
• St. Kilda is more popular than the Sydney Swans in Adelaide.
• Essendon Bombers are more likely to be college graduates than currently in high school.  At least for those on Facebook.
• In the AFL, the Essendon Bombers are more popular than the Geelong Cats, Hawthorn Hawks, North Melbourne Kangaroos, Richmond Tigers, St. Kilda Saints, and Sydney Swans for all Australians on Facebook.
• The Adelaide Crows are more popular in Brisbane than in Perth.
• Between the Perth Wildcats, Parramatta Eels, St. Kilda Football Club, Penrith Panthers, South Sydney Rabbitohs , Sydney Swans, and Wests Tigers, the mot popular teams in Hobart is St. Kilda with the Sydney Swans coming in second and the Parramatta Eels coming in third.
• Darwin only has 4,360  people from the city on Facebook.  Between, Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks, Gold Coast Titans, Geelong Cats, Perth Wildcats, Hawthorn Hawks, Newcastle Knights, Parramatta Eels, St. Kilda Football Club,South Sydney Rabbitohs, and Wests Tigers, no teams has more than 20 fans in the city and the 50 mile area around it.
• In Perth, the Perth Wildcats are more popular than the Perth Glory.

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.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• 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)

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.

This post is looking at the size and characteristics of the Brisbane Lions community on LiveJournal and Blogger. The sundry of disclaimers and methodologies can be found on earlier posts. LiveJournal data was collected on December 30, 2009 and Blogger information was gathered on December 29, 2009.

The Brisbane Lions community on Blogger is a bit smaller than the community for the Adelaide Crows, with 16 people listing the team or city and a footy related interest as an interest. This group has six women, nine men and one person who does not list a gender. This percentage of 38% puts their female audience at larger than the Crows (33%), Blues (25%), Magpies (25%) and Bombers (29%) communities located on Blogger. Twelve people list their ages of which two are obvious errors or intentional mistakes: One is 252 years old and the other is 253. The average age for a Lions fan on Blogger is 33, the median age is 30 and the mode age is 27. In terms of birthdays, two are Aries, one is a Cancer, two are Leos, four are Libras, two are Pisces, two are Scropios and one is a Virgo. All sixteen list their country of residence. Three are not from Australia: Two are from London, England and one is an American from Colorado. Ten of the Australians lists their state of residence. Of these, seven are from Queensland, two are from the ACT and one is from Victoria.

Like Blogger, the Brisbane Lions LiveJournal community is smaller than the community for the Adelaide Crows, with only 61 people listing the Brisbane Lions as an interest. 14 of these 16 updated in the past week and 33 total have updated in the past year. 4 have never updated. While smaller, this group appears to be a bit more active on LiveJournal than the community for the Adelaide Crows. 16 of the 61 people list their year of birth. Of these 16, the mean year of birth is 1984, and median and mode year of birth is 1986. The oldest were born in 1972 and the youngest was born in 1991. 56 of the 61 list their country of residence. 4 are from the United Kingdom and 7 are from the United States. The percentages of the total population is inverse of what it is for Blogger. With 45 from Australia, the percentage of the population from the country is similar to that of Blogger, 80% on LiveJournal compared to 81% on Blogger. These numbers are also some what comparable to the Twitter population which has 77% from Australia, 2% from the United Kingdom and 21% from United States out of 325 people counted. 33 of the 45 Australians list a state of residence. Of this, 19 are from Queensland, 10 are from Victoria, 2 are from South Australia with 1 from the Northern Territory and Western Australia.

What does the breakdown by state look like? The following chart shows LiveJournal, Blogger and its clones:

Related Posts:

• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Melbourne Victory on blogger
• Official Australian Football League Twitter accounts and follower population by country

This post is a series of posts looking at the size of Australian sports leagues on LiveJournal, its clones and other social networks. Five earlier posts were 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 and Adelaide Crows community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger.

There is a tool called Twitter Analyzer.  It allows you to get some data about your followers on Twitter.  It has some short comings, namely that it really only allows you to identify followers by country, rather than state.  When trying to figure out the population location inside Australia for a team, this is a bit of a problem.  Still, data is data and I ran every team’s official Twitter account through it and the results are… not what I consider particularly useful.  For me rather than highlight where an audience for a team is, this highlights the problem of Twitter follow spam.

Before going into this, Australian Football League games are available outside Australia.  The AFL has a list of their international partners that air games and news from the league.  The easiest place to get games is the United States and the United Kingdom where ESPN may provide them with up to three matches a week.  Ireland’s national network doesn’t appear to get games, so much as they get match summaries but they do get some on ESPN.  Europe gets the games on Eurosport but they are limited to two matches a week.  The Middle East and North Africa get two live matches a week.  New Zealand gets one live match a week on Sky, with additional coverage during sports related news casts.  Canada gets one game a week.  There is no indication that these games air live in Central and South America, Asia, and Oceania.  Airing of games in Africa is only very recent in a deal that appears to have taken place midway through the 2009 season. There clearly is an international market for the AFL and it is being fed.

In the United States, the major site for info on Australian rules football, Australian Football Association of North America, gets only about 503 visitors a month.  For the official AFL site, Compete estimates the size of the United States visiting population at 6,736 for the past month.  This is relatively small population that we are talking about.  Alexa says that the official AFL site gets 2.6% of its traffic from countries other than Australia, Sri Lanka, the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India.  Alexa does not rank the official site in Ecuador, Germany, Thailand, or France.

With that all in mind, time for Twitter data.  The team with the most followers it the Adelaide Crows with 3,696 follows.  The Essendon Bombers come in second with 3,808 followers.  The Collingwood Magpies are third at 3,506 followers and the Sydney Swans are fourth with 3,160 followers.  At the bottom are the Gold Coast Football Club with 139 followers.  The second smallest team in term of followers count is are the Fremantle Dockers with 282 followers.  Third is the Brisbane Lions with 363 followers.  All the other teams have follow counts above 500 and below 300.  Comparing the totals to the totals for LiveJournal clones, which is admittedly a bit small, something feels a bit out of whack but as I’m not Australian, not exposed to AFL coverage on a regular basis as part of my local news watching and reading, I’m not sure what.  The Essendon Bombers are number one for most followers on Twitter but rank 13th for total fans on LiveJournal clones.  The Collingwood Magpies rank 9th for population total on LJ clones and 3rd for followers on Twitter.  The Carlton Blues rank last for followers on LiveJournal clones but 6th on Twitter.  The Hawthorn Hawks rank 4th on LiveJournal clones and 11th on Twitter.  The Brisbane Lions rank 3rd on LiveJournal clones and 11th on Twitter.  The Fremantle Dockers rank 2nd on LiveJournal clones and 15 on Twitter.

As I implied above, there is an international audience for the AFL but the size of it is some what limited.  Twitter Analyzer’s numbers don’t add up when comparing them to total followers so I’m not sure how accurate they really are. Overall, when total follower counts for all teams are added together, the total is 26,134 followers.  Based on Twitter Analyzer, 15,191 people do not list their country in their profiles.  That leaves us with 10,943 people who do list their country which would be fine but  9,059 are from Australia and 4,669 are from the United States which shouldn’t be possible.  Given that, I’m just going to compare the totals based on the data that Twitter Analyzer provides and ignore the total followers numbers from Twitter.

Using these numbers, 59.6% of all followers of official AFL accounts are Australians.  Americans represent 30.7% of all followers.  Great Britain accounts for 3.3% of all followers.  Germany, Ecuador, and India all have percentages between 1.0 and 1.9%.   In addition to those numbers, 42 accounts from Greenland, 68 from Thailand, 18 from Vietnam and 31 from Argentina follow these official team Twitter accounts.

I’m going to call highjinks here.  I know there is a US audience for the AFL.  We have our own domestic leagues, which attract a small audience mostly of die hard fans and people connected to the players.  The games are televised.  But I cannot believe that the Australian audience for teams on Twitter is only twice that of the US audience.  I’m also having a hard time believe that Ecuador and Argentina have a large following on Twitter.  I don’t believe that these numbers are a reliable indicator of international interest by country in these teams.  Evidence seems to indicate that two of the following are likely taking place: People are not listing the country they are actually from AND that these accounts have people following them with the intention of trying to get an autofollow back.  This data just is not reliable to determine the size of an team’s audience, or even the team’s effectiveness at using Twitter to reach their target audience.

That said, the following is a country by country break down based on the numbers from Twitter Analyzer.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• 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)