If you want similar data related to a specific club, let me know and we can see if we can work out some sort of arrangement.  I’d love to be able to talk to more Canberra based professional, state and national teams.

Related Posts:

• An interview with Ben Pollack from the Canberra Raiders
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Data absent context can change the meaning: Did Julia Gillard hurt the Bulldogs?
• Australian Hockey League on everything

The ways I wanted to determine this were to measure the Alexa traffic for the Western Bulldogs site, the number of followers for Bulldogs related accounts on Twitter, the number of fans for the official page and unofficial fan pages on Facebook, the number of and membership increase for fan pages that mention both Julia Gillard and the Western Bulldogs, possibly demographic differences between the Gillard groups and Buldogs only fanpages, the number of mentions for the Western Bulldogs on bebo, the number of people listing the team as an interest on LiveJournal and its clones, the number of pages mentioning Julia Gillard and the Western Bulldogs on google.com.au, and the number and geographic location of edits to the Western Bulldogs article on Wikipedia.

Some of this data on its own might suggest that Julia Gillard hurt the Bulldogs.  Heck, that was my initial assessment.  One of the Western Bulldogs fan pages on Facebook lost 30 people, an anti-Akermanis group lost two people, a pro-Akermanis group lost two people, the Twitter growth was almost non-existent despite Tweets mentioning Gillard, and the Western Bulldog’s site rank on Alexa for Australia fell almost 2,000 places between the 25th and 26th.  Toss in the fact that the Gillard created communities on Facebook were fewer and had much less growth than the anti-Akermanis over the same period.   All of these appear to be really good indicators that Gillard’s effect on the team online was not a great one.

I really want to draw that conclusion.  I almost think I could make a really strong argument that this is exactly the case.  The problem involves putting this into the context of the rest of the AFL.  The Brisbane Lions don’t appear to have an official Facebook fan page but one of their biggest ones lost 30 members the day after the Bulldogs lost 30 members.  Between June 22 and June 26, only one AFL team hasn’t had their Alexa traffic rank for Australia rise; that is the Melbourne Demons.  For that period, three teams saw a rank drop of over 1,000.  Twitter follow gains are about even for all teams.  Official Facebook fan page growth is also pretty close.  In that context, it is hard to say that Julia Gillard had much impact at all.  In fact, for the Alexa data, the big drop could probably be attributed to the fact that they only had half the teams playing a game for this weekend and the weekend before that.  The impact of Gillard on the growth of the Western Bulldogs just probably isn’t there.

In the wider context, no effect.  In a limited context of the team she barracks for, possible effect.  Which conclusion is the right one?

Related Posts:

• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Australian Hockey League on everything
• New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom

LinkedIn

LiveJournal and clones

This table looks at activity patterns for LJ comms…

MySpace

Age break down of some accounts’s friends…

Orkut

Twitter
Looking for growth information…

YouTube

Related Posts:

• Popularity of Australian sports leagues across various social networks
• Australian Hockey League on blogger, LiveJournal, and LiveJournal clones
• WNBL on LiveJournal and bebo
• AFL Canberra on LiveJournal clones

A copy of this can be found in PDF form at : http://ozziesport.com/storm.pdf .  The pdf version that includes footnotes that explain the methodology used and contain additional links.

Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy

By Laura Hale, University of Canberra

On April 22, 2010, the news of salary cap violations on the part of the Melbourne Storm broke online in such publications as the Fox Sports, on television including ABC news and on multiple social networks including Facebook and Twitter. By April 23, the news was available in various print publications including The Australian and the Sydney Morning Herald. During the news coverage, NRL fans learned that the team had been fined $1.8 million, stripped of two premiereships and were not eligible to earn points towards 2010’s premiership. (“Melbourne storm stripped,” 2010) The team was being punished for salary cap violations over the past five years, where the total cap violation in that period was $1.7 million with $400,000 of that total cap violation occurring in 2009. (“Melbourne storm stripped,” 2010)

Early in the coverage of the Melbourne Storm, several issues were discussed including the impact this would have on the fan base for the team, the subsequent economic fallout for Storm and other clubs in the league, and if the players would try to leave the club or lower their performance level. The consequences that people feared have yet to bear out: The fan base for the Melbourne Storm has grown, attendance has not fallen, membership is up and players have not left the team and the team continues to win.

This article will examine the online response to the Melbourne Storm controversy. Specifically, it will look at the interest patterns on several networks, follow patterns on Twitter and Facebook, and activity levels on 43things, wikis and Yahoo!Groups. It will prove that, on the whole, the controversy has not eroded the online fanbase for the team and has resulted in an increased profile for the team in ways can have a net positive for the team and their sponsors.

Profile Interest

One way to quickly gage online interest for a team is to check the number of people who list them as an interest on social networks that include that option. The level of interest on a network will, in general, increase over time. Including an interest is a rather passive activity that most people do at the time that they signup on a service. They may update their interests once a year when they do an overhaul on their profile. Other factors may result in an update of interests, most notably a desire to associate or disassociate with certain people and organizations. The latter can generally require a certain amount of rage and disillusionment and does not happen that often. For adding interests, it can require a certain degree of wanting to stand in solidarity with some one or thing in the face of perceived oppression. Adding or removing an interest will generally require a large emotional response in people to motivate them to change their interests on social networks where an individual has not been active in the past six months. These conditions mean that numbers for interests are relatively stable or increase. A big shift downward is possible but unlikely.

Did the Melbourne Storm controversy result in people being motivated to update their interests to include or exclude the team? Yes and no, many people added them as an interest on Facebook but the numbers remained level across several other networks.

As of January 9, 2010, 17,020 had listed the Melbourne Storm as an interest on Facebook. By May 9, 2010, this number had increased to 41,240, or 24,220 new people. From January 9 to May 9, 2010, there was also an increase of roughly 120 fans within fifty miles of Hobart adding the team as an interest, going from less than 20 to 140. Canberra saw a similar increase in fans, going from 140 on January 9 to 1,020 by May 9, 2010, an increase of 880 new people listing the team as an interest. For fans within fifty miles of Cranbourne, there was an increase of 5,540 fans going from 7,140 fans on January 9 to 12,580 fans on May 9, 2010. Some of this increase on Facebook can be possibly attributed to a change in Facebook in mid-April, where people were encouraged to add their interests as likes of fanpages and vice versa. (Albanesius, 2010) It cannot entirely explain the shift as the official Melbourne Storm page is a user page, not a fan page so the interest to liking will not be automatically converted. At the same time, the number of people listing the team as an interest is roughly ten times as many who follow the Storm’s official Facebook profile and suggests that interest listing is independent of following the official team presence.

In addition to the Melbourne Storm interest on Facebook, there have been two new interests related to the storm created in the wake of the controversy: “Shame On You Melbourne Storm” with fewer than twenty people listing it as an interest, and “Sucked In Melbourne Storm Haha” with 3,240 people listing it as an interest. The latter definitely connects to a Facebook fanpage with the same name, which has 8,432 people who like it.

While Facebook saw an explosion in growth of people listing the team as an interest, other sites allowing interest listing on profiles remained stagnant or saw limited growth. This includes bebo, where there has been no change as of April 28 and May 9 from 402 people that was originally recorded on March 18, 2010. Blogger saw some growth for the number of people listing the team as an interest. As of January 18, 2010, four people had listed the team. By May 9, 2010, six people had listed them as an interest. As the time frame is wider than that of bebo, it might be possible to account for the increase as a pre-season boost, rather than in response to the controversy. Either way, this was an increase of fifty percent for new people listing the team as an interest.

LiveJournal saw no growth in people listing the team as an interest between January 10 and May 9, 2010. Of the 25 LiveJournal accounts listing the Melbourne Storm as an interest, only five have updated since the controversy broke. LiveJournal’s clones including Dreamwidth, Blurty and DeadJournal also saw no growth as of May 9. This contrasts to the Brisbane Broncos on LiveJournal, where one person removed the team as an interest during a similar period. Dreamwidth had two users listing the team as an interest as of January 9, Blurty had one user as of January 9, and DeadJournal had one user as of December 23, 2009. None of the people on LiveJournal’s clones who list the Storm as an interest have updated their journals since the controversy happened. The most recent updates occurred on Dreamwidth, taking place in early March 2010. The other account last updated in April 2009. The Blurty account last updated in November 2005 and the DeadJournal account last updated in January 2006.

One or two smaller niche networks have limited interest for specific teams or where people only list the NRL as an interest. This includes BlackPlanet, generally targeted at African Americans inside the United States. There was one person who listed the NRL as an interest on the network as of February 15, 2010. This has not changed as of May 9. Care2 is a social networked targeted at people who wish to make the world a better place. As of March 20, 2010, no one had listed the Melbourne Storm as an interest. This changed by May 9, when three people listed the team as an interest. Given the names, limited profiles and join dates, it is possible that these accounts are all tied to one individual. Gaia Online is a small, niche network for role players. As of March 11, 2010, no one had listed the Melbourne Storm as an interest. There is interest in the NRL on the network as people listed the Brisbane Lions, Canberra Raiders, Parramatta Eels and Sydney Roosters as interests. There has not been any change for any of these teams as of May 9. The limited growth and lack of pull back could suggest that larger interest in the NRL has not been diminished on smaller networks as a result of the controversy.

Wiki Activity

Wikis are, at their most basic, web sites where visitors can easily edit the content of the site. Sometimes, there are limits to who can edit put in place by the creator of a wiki. These include requiring users to register or confirm an e-mail before they edit, or to get their account approved by the admin before they can edit. Some wikis have policies when breaking news happen or an article gets trolled to lock down the article so only registered users can edit or wiki admins can edit. The culture of editing on specific wikis thus develops around the who can edit process as locking down wikis to prevent edits can effect the frequency that an article is updated.

For comprehensive wiki articles, the ideal is to have to have editors who approach the topic from different perspectives, where there is inherent conflict in the content and perspective being presented. If this situation does not exist, an article can be highjacked by one or two editors who seek to push their own perspective. The more edits and people involved in contributing to the article, the less likely the article will be biased. This also makes vandalism less problematic as people are incentivized to quickly remove that material.

Wikis can be a good tool for gauging interest in a particular topic over time as most wiki software keeps a record of all edits to a page. For some of the big wikis, like Wikipedia, data also exists for how many views an article has over a certain time period. This can help track more passive community interest in a topic.

Wikipedia’s English language article about the Melbourne Storm is probably the most visited wiki article about the team and appears third in Google’s search results for the team. The article, found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Storm , was created on May 23, 2004. As of May 9, 2010, the article had 1,732 total edits made to it. The controversy involving the Melbourne Storm broke on April 22, 2010. 1,471 of the edits were made prior to that. In the period between the article’s creation and the day before the controversy broke, an average of .681 edits per day were made to the article. In the eighteen-day period since the controversy broke, an average of 14.5 edits per day were made to the article. The vast majority of these edits were made in the first three days, with 90 edits made on April 22, 56 edits made on April 23 and 69 edits made on April 24. On April 24, in response to repeated vandalism, the article was semi-protected; this meant that only registered users who had confirmed their e-mail could edit the article. The protection had the effect of reducing the total number of daily edits to the article. After that, peak editing days included April 26 and May 3 with seven edits, and April 25 and May 5 with six edits. There were zero edits on April 28, May 6, May 7 and May 9. The controversy certainly caused an increase in the number of edits. If the day that the controversy broke and the next two days are excluded, the average number of daily edits is 3.06 edits per day. This is still higher than the period prior to the controversy and the trend will probably continue at least until the end of the season.

The article views per day mirrors the total edits by day. Based on data provided by Henrick (2010, May 1 and May 9), there is a correlation of .904 between the total daily edits and the total daily page views. According to Henrick (2010, May 1) during April 2010, the article was viewed a total of 49,540 times. Of these views, 40,355 views were between April 22, when the story broke, and April 30. The peak day for visits was on April 22, when the article was viewed 14,800 times. The average page views between April 22 and April 30 was 4,482 views per day. If this period is extended out to include data provided by Henrick (2010, May 9) for May 1 to May 8, the average views per day is 2,700. If the three days around when the controversy first broke are excluded, the average edits per day drops to 1,143. This stands in contrast to the period between April 1 and April 21 where the average page views per day was 438. The above average page views trend appears to be continuing. There has not been a decrease in overall interest in the Melbourne Storm on English Wikipedia.

In addition to the English language article about the Melbourne Storm on Wikipedia, there are articles in two other languages: French and Italian. The French language article, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Storm , was created on March 1, 2006. Since the controversy started on April 22 and May 8, there have been 35 total edits to the article. Unlike the English language article, total edits per day peaked on April 24, 2010 with 19 with the second highest editing day occurring on April 23 with 7. The average total edits per day during this period was 2.1. In April, prior to the controversy, the average edits per day was zero. Also unlike the English language article, it was not locked because of vandalism. According to Henrickhe (2010, May 1) peak views per day happened on April 23 and April 24 with 59. The next day with the greatest number of views in the period between April 22 and May 8 is May 8 with 34. The average viewed per day in the April 22 to May 8 period was 17.4 and the average viewed per day in April prior to the controversy was 3.4. The correlation between the total edits per day and views per day in the period between April 1 and May 8 is .7740. The French Wikipedia article saw an increase that was proportionally bigger than the English article but the total views and edits were much smaller on the French article.

The Italian language Wikipedia article, http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melbourne_Storm , was created on December 21, 2007. The article had two edits in 2008 and one in 2009. Since the controversy broke on April 22 and May 8, there have two edits to the article. These two edits are the only edits made during 2010. According to Henrickhe (2010, May 1) , the total number of article views from April 1 to April 21 was 30. According to Henrickhe (2010, May 8), the total number of page views per day was 58. The day with the most views was April 23, with 14 views. The next day with the most views was May 3, with 8 views. The Italian Wikipedia article saw an increase in the total number of edits and page views as a result of the controversy. It might have been larger but the Italian interest in the team is much smaller to start with than the French or English language communities.

Outside of Wikipedia, there are a few small wikis that focus on the NRL and Rugby League. These wikis generally lack detailed information on the daily total page views but still provide information on the editing history. One such wiki is the NRL Central Wiki that is hosted on Wikia. It has an article about the Melbourne Storm located at http://nrl.wikia.com/wiki/Melbourne_Storm. The article was created on August 13, 2009 and was last updated on October 10, 2009. It has not been updated since the controversy. The wiki the article is hosted has only had three non-bot edits in the past 30 days so the lack of updates is not surprising. A few other wikis have articles that mention the Melbourne Storm. Most of these are institutional wikis where article histories are not available or where content is posted by its creator and never intended to be edited by a wider audience. There does not appear to be a movement by wikis to create additional content in response to or to try to capitalize on interest in response to the controversy.

Twitter

Twitter is a microblogging service. Users can post 140 character messages , called tweets, that are shared with anyone who chooses to follow them. Twitter is one of the most well known and popular social networks in Australia.

There are two main ways to measure Twitter activity. The first is to keep track of the total followers an account has. The second way is to monitor the total number of daily tweets posted about a topic posted across the whole network and by specific accounts.

The Melbourne Storm have an official Twitter account at @MelbStormRLC . There is an unofficial Melbourne Storm Twitter account run by a fansite at @MelbourneStorm_ . As of March 9, 2010, the official account had 458 followers. This contrasts with @MelbourneStorm_ which had 605 followers as of March 8, 2010. By May 10, about nineteen days after the controversy broke, the official account had 1,037 followers and @ MelbourneStorm_ had 720 followers. That was an increase of 579 and 115 followers respectively. The situation has not hurt growth for either account and people are still interested in keeping up with the team and what they are doing.

When compared to the official Twitter accounts for the NRL, Gold Coast Titans, Manly Sea Eagles, North Queensland Cowboys, Parramatta Eels, Canberra Raiders, South Sydney Rabbitohs and New Zealand Warriors, the follower growth for the Melbourne Storm suggests a potential connection to the controversy creating additional interest or a fanbase that has become much more interested in Twitter in a short period of time. (Table 1) The only account with a greater increase in total number of followers is the NRL, which picked up 942 followers. The Melbourne Storm saw a fifty-five percent increase in the new followers. The next closest team of the aforementioned in the same period was the Canberra Raiders who saw a forty-two percent increase. In this context, it reaffirms that additional interest in the team was likely generated by the controversy.

Detailed statistics regarding the total number of references for the Melbourne Storm by day on Twitter are not available. It makes it harder to determine the total daily volume of conversation involving the team in the days surrounding the news leaking about the salary cap violations. People were interested in the Melbourne Storm as the team was briefly trending on Twitter when the story broke. Manual counting can be done but Twitter search only goes back around one week What can be more easily tracked is the posting volume per day of specific accounts related to the Melbourne Storm to compare their activities before and after the controversy broke. In the case of the @MelbourneStorm_, the account does not update regularly with about twenty tweets made during the past year. Their last tweet was on March 24, 2010; they have not posted since the news broke. @MelbStormRLC has posted several tweets since the controversy and has mentioned it. From April 22 to May 9, eighteen days after the story broke, the Storm have made eleven total tweets. Prior to that, the team had made thirteen tweets. The difference in tweet totals is inconsequential. Neither account made changes to their Twitter posting in response in to the controversy.

Searching through Twitter, it is very clear that people are still tweeting about the team and, as of May 10, are tweeting about them at a comparatively higher rate than other teams in the league. One popular way of indicating a tweet is about a certain topic is to include a hashtag in front of a word. This makes the whole phrase easily searchable on Twitter. For example, a person who is tweeting about the Melbourne Storm may include #melbournestorm to indicate the tweet is about the team. There generally fewer of these tweets as a great many accounts on Twitter come directly from RSS feeds. These feeds were not originally created for Twitter and are absent some of the cultural practices and do not use coding tools to help make finding posts easier. Thus, tweets tagged with a # are fewer and more readily countable in search. This allows for comparisons to be made between teams over a short period. For the period between May 3 and May 8, 2010, #melbournestorm beat out all the other teams that were sampled for most the most discussed NRL team. (Table 2) There were twenty-one references for the team on May 5. This is sixteen more than #manlyseaeagles on the same date and the only other team with five or more tweets with a hashtag on a single day. The controversy can likely be seen as the cause for the increase in the number of tweets when compared to other teams in the league.

Facebook

Facebook is one of the largest social networks in Australia and it arguably has the largest population of Melbourne Storm fans online. Outside of interest monitoring, the easiest way to monitor the activities of fans is to examine the fan community’s growth on official pages and groups, and activity levels on these groups.

The Melbourne Storm has an official user profile on Facebook. The profile is for their mascot, Storm Man. It has a limited profile view so only people who have friended the account can view posts and interact with content posted by Storm Man. When the profile was checked on April 6, 2010, the account had 3,203 friends. Checked again on April 28, the account had 4,154. On May 9, the account had 4,401 friends and on May 10, it had 4,494 friends. While the total new friends for their account was fewer than other clubs such as the Brisbane Lions over the same period (Table 3), the team had the largest percentage increase in: 28.7% versus 13.5% for the next closest team, the North Queensland Cowboys. The controversy did not cost the team any friends and resulted in a higher percentage gain when compared to other teams. It has resulted in a net momentum gain that continues almost three weeks after the controversy first broke out.

Facebook Fan Pages are created by teams and by fans. The person who created the Fan Page can post to the wall, control else who can post to the wall, control the type of content posted to the Fan Page and create a unique landing page. Members of a Fan Page can comment on wall posts and indicate they like the post. There are many Melbourne Storm fans that have created Fan Pages and many more have joined, commented and liked posts made to these Fan Pages. A quick search on Facebook for Fan Pages dedicated to the team using the keywords “Melbourne Storm” results in over 500 pages about the team. By looking at a sample of the individual Fan Pages to check the daily posting volume of wall posts and the number of likes and comments to those posts, an idea of how the controversy effected fan interests can be determined.

For this, three Fan Pages were chosen. These were the top three Fan Pages in search that were not created in response to the controversy. They are Melbourne Storm, Best team in NRL.. Melbourne Storm ! and melbourne storm . The total posts per day by the person who runs the Fan Page, and comments and likes per post associated with the post for the day were recorded for the period between April 1 and May 10, 2010. (Table 4) When comparing the total posts in the period between April 1 and April 22, 2010 to the period between April 23 to May 10, two of the three Fan Pages had more posts made by the maintainers before the controversy. (Graph 1) Two of the three groups saw an increase in the total comments made after the controversy. For Melbourne Storm, a Fan Page with over 40,000 members, the increase was massive going from 54 comments to 803 comments. The increase for Best team in NRL.. Melbourne Storm !, a group with 281 members as of May 10, was much smaller. It went from 252 to 257 comments. For all three groups, there was an increase in the number of likes after the controversy took place. While posting levels by Fan Page maintainers may not have increased, the level of engagement and interest in the team for the fan population did. The controversy has created a climate where fans are more engaged with posts.

Mailing lists

During much of the 1990s, mailing lists were one of the most popular tools for fans to use in order to communicate with each other. The creation of mailing lists became much easier when sites like egroups, coollists, topica, Yahoo!Groups and Google groups were created. They largely automated the process of creating mailing lists, provided web based archives and removed barriers of having to understand majordomo syntax in order to join a list.

Australian sports fans actively used these services to participate in their team’s fandom. Some leagues and teams were more popular than other leagues and teams. Amongst the fan communities utilizing mailing lists were Melbourne Storm fans. Most of the lists dedicated to team were on Yahoo!Groups, where there are currently eight lists. These eight lists include melbournestorm2, melbournestormrugbyleague, melbournestormsupportersclub, Storm_Squad, StormSupporters, MSSC-Storm-Mailouts and melbourne_storm_supporters. Many of these lists are no longer active. There are a variety of reasons for this including absent list owners, large volumes of spam content posted on list, people switching to different services in order to express their fondness for the team or fans losing interest in a team. If spam content is not counted in total posting volume by month, the peak posting month was February 2001 with 59 total posts across all eight lists. January 2001 had the next highest posting volume by month with 50 posts. Given the always small and inactive community, it is not surprising that there have been zero posts on these lists since the controversy broke out. These lists have also seen zero growth in membership since their totals were last checked on February 20, 2010. The controversy had no effect on the Storm’s mailing list community.

43things

According to Robot Co-op (2010), 43things “is the world’s largest goal-setting community.” Members of the site set goals for themselves that are published on their profiles and on lists of others who share the same goal. Members are also encouraged to blog about their efforts in trying to complete their goals. Other members are encouraged to cheer people on as they work to complete a goal. When a goal has been completed, people change the goal status to “I did this” and it appears as completed on their profile. This site is relatively popular; according to Alexa Internet, Inc. (2010), the site is ranked the 2,549^th most popular website in Australia.

There are a number of people who have set Australia related sports goals on 43thing. This includes playing for certain clubs to attending the finals to seeing the team they barrack for play. On April 1, 2010, the site was searched for any goals that connected to the Melbourne Storm. Only one goal related to the Melbourne Storm was found. It is “Go to a Melbourne Storm Game.” Two people, erynne and mmcpharlane, had listed this as a goal they were working towards completing. When checked again on May 10, no one had added any additional goals related to the Melbourne Storm. No movement had been made towards completing the existing goal: Both individuals still listed themselves as working towards it and neither had updated their blog to indicate they were any closer to accomplishing this goal. The controversy has not had any measurable impact on people’s goal setting and efforts towards accomplishing their goals as they pertain to the Melbourne Storm.

Conclusion

The controversy involving the Melbourne Storm’s salary cap violations and the subsequent punishment of rewarding them zero points for the season has not resulted in a loss of people interested in the team or resulted in a drop in activity level on the part of fans. Across smaller and less popular services and web sites, there has been no behavior change; the controversy has had a null effect in that no one removed content or interests, nor created content and added interests. For larger sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Wikipedia, there has been a gain in followers, viewers and interactions. Eighteen days out from the initial incident, a long tail increase in views and interactions exists when compared to the period prior to the controversy. While some of the initial burst of activity and interest could be a consequence of negativity publicity, the long tail interest two to three weeks out is much harder to attribute to solely to wanting to watch a controversy for the sake of entertainment. If interest continue to stay elevated, the club should be able to leverage to increase club membership and sponsorship deals, especially as they apply to their online presence, because they have successfully used the controversy to grow their fanbase. The behaviors of fans demonstrate that have been incentized to express their loyalty and solidarity with the team.

References

Albanesius, C. (2010, April 19). Facebook makes ‘connections,’ adds community pages. PC Magazine, Retrieved from http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2362825,00.asp

Alexa Internet, Inc. (2010, May 10). 43things.com – site info from alexa. Retrieved from http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/43things.com

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 1). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 49377 times in 201004 . Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/en/201004/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 1). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 276 times in 201004. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/fr/201004/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 1). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 276 times in 201004. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/it/201004/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 9). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 5561 times in 201005. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/en/201005/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 9). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 91 times in 201005. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/fr/201005/Melbourne_Storm

Henrik, Initials. (2010, May 9). Wikipedia article traffic statistics: Melbourne_Storm has been viewed 19 times in 201005. Retrieved from http://stats.grok.se/it/201005/Melbourne_Storm

Melbourne storm stripped of two premierships for salary cap breach. (2010, April 22). Fox Sports, Retrieved from http://www.foxsports.com.au/story/0,8659,27022196-5018866,00.html

Robot Co-op. (2010, May 10). List your goals on 43 things. Retrieved from http://www.43things.com/

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I’m trying to make a map of Australian sports fandom across various social networks.  This is going to take a long time and require a long explanation to understand exactly what you’re seeing.  This map isn’t intended to be all comprehensive.  I’m still collecting data and will likely continue to collecting data for a long time.    That’s why a long explanation is needed.

Country League Rugby: Group 21 is represented exclusively by the Facebook group SCONE THOROUGHBREDS RUGBY LEAGUE CLUB. Location was identified the location of the school network members listed themselves as belonging to.

For the NWBL, amongst the social networks I’ve checked so far, only You!Tube had people who listed the league.  And that was one person.  There were several people on Facebook who belonged the Wollongong Roller Hawks group and listed a network which I could affiliate with a city.

The AHL is represented by a Facebook group for the Tassie Tigers and three people on bebo. There were no fans on LiveJournal’s clones or blogger.

The AFL includes full data from 43things, bebo, blogger, eacademy, Daniel Jackson – TIGER TUFF!, Law Hawks and No matter how bad they are, I will still barrack for the Richmond Tigers! groups on Facebook, Gaia Online (but no one was an AFL fan who listed a city), LiveJournal and its clones, only Collingwood from MySpace profile search, only Brisbane Lions, Collingwood Magpies and Carlton Blues from orkut, only the scrapheap_afl mailing list on Yahoo!groups, and only the Geelong Cats on YouTube.

For the NRL, the following Facebook groups were included: Matt Johns to coach the Newcastle Knights in 2010! , Wests Tigers NYC and Melbourne-based Wests Tigers Fanatics. Only the Brisbane Broncos were looked at on 43things. Every team was searched for on bebo, blogger, Gaia Online, LiveJournal and its clones. The sample is much smaller than the AFL. (Though the community on bebo is much larger than AFL community on bebo. It might sort of make up for that.)

WNBL totals came from YouTube, MySpace, eacademy, bebo and LiveJournal clones.

For the NBL, only the Brisbane Bullets were looked at on 43 things. On Facebook for the NBL, unlike for most leagues looked at, an attempt was made to find every group connected to the team. Thus, the following groups and fanpages are represented: Townsville McDonald’s Crocodiles, Adelaide 36ers, Adelaide 36ers are the greatest team of ANY kind EVER!!, Adelaide 36ers Fan Zone, Bring Allen Iverson to the Adelaide 36ers!, Bring Dusty Rychart back to the Adelaide 36ers ~ beg, plead, grovel ;p, Cairns Taipans , Croc Nation, Early 90′s Perth Wildcats appreciation group, Gold Coast Blaze, Melbourne Tigers, melbourne tigers are the best team, Melbourne Tigers Basketball Club, Melbourne Tigers cheer squeda east and south ends , Melbourne Tigers NBL HUMMER CHAMPIONS 2007/08, Melbourne Tigers NBL supporters, New Zealand Breakers, Official Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats, Perth Wildcats (Catties Fans), SAVE OUR MELBOURNE TIGERS NBL TEAM , THIS SEASON., Save Our South Dragons:www. saveourdragons.com, South Dragons 2008/09 Nbl Champions, South Melbourne Dragons, The Melbourne Tigers Fan Group, The Official Adelaide 36ers Page, Townsville McDonald’s Crocodiles and Wollongong Hawks. If this was done with other clubs and leagues, the representation for the AFL and NRL would probably be much, much bigger. Every team was looked at on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and its clones. It also includes members of melbournetigers on Yahoo!Groups.

For the VFL, only the Geelong Cats and Coburg Tigers were checked. On MySpace, Frankston Dolphins , Sandringham Zebras , Werribee Tigers , Collingwood Magpies and Geelong Cats were checked. All teams were checked on LiveJournal and its clones, blogger and bebo.

A-League is represented by a search of all teams on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and its clones. Orkut was searched for Melbourne Victory fans. It might not show up on the first version of this map because after about seven layers, the mapping software gets slow.

Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location map

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• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Most popular AFL and NRL teams on Facebook
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
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Interesting to see what networks have what populations.  The WNBL is only really an interest on 2 networks while the AFL is present on every network.  These networks all have different population sizes so total numbers is really apple to oranges in some ways.  I then decided to rank the leagues by how popular they were on each network.  The most popular league ranks 1, the next most popular league ranks 2.  If there is a tie, they share the same rank.  The results of that are in the following table:

This table is a bit more interesting.  Across most networks, the AFL is the most popular league.  The NRL is the second most popular league.  First class cricket, compromising state cricket teams, is the third most popular.  The A-League and Super 14 are close behind.  When you get down near the bottom, patterns become interesting.  The WNBL is not as popular as Women’s Flat Track Derby Association.  This is largely a result of the large number of fans on Facebook.  AFL Canberra is also more popular than the VFL.  This is because of the high rank on JournalFen.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_attendance_figures_at_domestic_professional_sports_leagues lists the attendance by league for six Australian sports leagues in 2009.  I cannot find a better list of attendance data for Australian sports league, especially the minor leagues.  That makes the rest of this analysis a bit problematic but moving forward anyway… This data is then put into the following table:

For total number of people attending during the course of a season, it certainly seems to track with the average league rank on the social networks in this sample.  Total people and total attendance seems to track some too.  I ran the correlation to confirm these observations:

Total attendance does correlate meaningfully.  Average attendance isn’t as meaningful but the correlation is still relatively strong.  There is a relationship there.

I’ve found that similar relationships exist with American baseball teams.  The issue of course is: Cause and effect.  Does high fan attendance lead to more fans listing their teams as an interest on social media? Or does becoming interested in a team on social media sites lead people to attending games?  It feels like the first but I have no evidence either way.

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The places were then put on a map.  The only hiccup was Noosa, Queensland.  It was skipped.  The United States was also left off because it seemed likely that those fans were not fans of the team, but rather the Institute itself.   The map seems to reinforce the idea from earlier posts that Australian sports teams largely come out of a regional fan base.

WNBL on Bebo and LiveJournal by Australian city

WNBL on Bebo and LiveJournal by Australian city 3 2 1 0 Adelaide Lightning Australian Institute of Sport Canberra Capitals Logan Thunder Perth Lynx Sydney Uni Flames Townsville Fire

Regarding Facebook, I did check them using their advertising data that pulls from people’s interest lists.  There were none.  In fact, no one even listed the WNBL as an interest on Facebook.  There may be a number of Fan pages and groups on Facebook dedicated to these teams but this doesn’t look at them, just like when doing interest based research, I don’t look at LiveJournal or bebo groups.

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There are no mailing lists dedicated to any specific team. There are two dedicated to the WNBL. They are wnbl and pastandpresentwnblplayers. Both have three members.  The second has never had a post made to it.  The first has only had one post.

While there are no lists dedicated to specific teams in the WNBL, there are several mailing lists dedicated to Australian female basketball players.  One such list is tullybevilaqua. Another is laurenjacksonrules.  Neither of these lists are currently active.  (Both are being over run by spam and have been for years.)  The lists don’t highlight the player’s career in the WNBL but rather seem to focus on the athlete playing in US’s WNBA.  Given that, it is hard to slot these player based lists by team.

I’m not entirely certain what it says about Australian women’s basketball that there is an absence of lists for teams but not for players.  Did mailing lists predate a greater emergence of the WNBL?  Are people more interested in star athletes than in any sort of team allegiance?  Is the focus on Australian players who made it into the WNBA more of an issue of Australian pride in players who made it on a big stage? It could be all of those.

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While teams from many leagues were looked at, not all those teams had people listing them as an interest and where the individual listed their city of residence. The following leagues did though: AFL, AFL Canberra, A-League, ANZ Championship, First class cricket, NBL, NRL, NSW Premier League, Rugby League/State of Origin, Super 14, and Victorian Amateur Football Association. To make the map more readable, some of the least represented leagues were left off the map.

The following map was created using MapPoint:

Play by City 220 15 1 AFL A-League NBL NRL Super 14

The map clearly shows a geographic preference in New South Wales for the NRL.  Victoria clearly prefers the AFL.  The rest of the country tends to also support the AFL.  The pattern of geographic distribution for fans of these leagues appears to fit patterns I have seen described elsewhere.  It will be interesting to see if these patterns hold for bebo.

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• Alexa rank for Australian leagues and clubs
• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
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• Adelaide United on LiveJournal
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Only three list their year of birth: 1985, 1987, 1990.  Their average year of birth is 1987.3 and median year of birth is 1987.  This puts their average age of 23 at slightly older than the United Fans on bebo (20) and younger than the United fans on blogger (26).  This pattern of age group ordering going like has been pretty well established in earlier posts.

The range for most recently updating on LiveJournal is between 1 week and 284 weeks or five and a half years ago.  Four have updated in the past month. Two have updated between between 18 months and 24 months ago.  The remaining four updated between 3.5 and 5.5 years ago.

The fanbase isn’t particularly large any sort of wider conclusion.  It will be interesting though to see if this pattern holds for the rest of the A-League on LiveJournal.

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• Adelaide United on bebo
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The AHL has zero presence that I can find on Twitter, which is a bit surprising.  No one appears to even be reporting on them.  They also appear to not have a presence on Facebook.  Developing these two would probably help increase their overall visibility.

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This is another example of a problem team that makes trying to figure out the fan community size problematic.

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One of the side leagues that I’ve been looking at is Gridiron Australia, the league for American football.  I had the list of teams.  I check everything on LiveJournal, its clones, blogger and then bebo.  At bebo, I realized I had a problem.  For the Victorian Eagles, no problem.  (There is one fan.  He is male, 21 years old and from Victoria.)  There is one person for the Queensland Sundevils. For the SA Fire?  There were 40.  Turns out that there is an artist named SA-fire.  It also sometime short for the San Antonio Fire Department.  Given that, the short form isn’t a search form that will be used.  (Though one or two of the people who list SA Fire as an interest are clearly South Australia Fire team.)  The long form search is the one that goes for bebo.  With that search, there are only two people who list them as an interest.

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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.

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Unsurprisingly, no one lists these teams as an interest on blogger, LiveJournal or LiveJournal’s clones.  These are niche teams for a small audience.  The sport isn’t likely to have much international interest.  The league isn’t professional.  The Australian audience on these services isn’t that big or active.  It seems unlikely that they will ever garner a community around them unless some one comes in and brings their own audience for this content.

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Australia Test by City 2 1 Adelaide Thunderbirds Melbourne Vixens New South Wales Swifts (Sydney Swifts) Northern Mystics Southern Steel Sydney Swifts

The map has that limited perspective because there were no Queensland based fans. That includes people who just listed state, not city. The same situation existed for Western Australia, Tasmania, the ACT and Northern Territory.

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On bebo, there are 51 fans of the team.  Because most people barracking for the team are Kiwis (77.8% or 28 of the 36 people listing a country of residence), this post will be rather brief without much analysis.  In addition to the Kiwis, the team on bebo has 1 fan from Fiji, 1 from the United Kingdom and 6 from Australia. The six Australians are distributed somewhat equally in the country: 2 from New South Wales, 2 from Queensland, 1 from South Australia and 1 from Western Australia.

25 of the 51 list their age.  Of these, the mean age is 28, median is 26 and mode is 18. The Queensland Reds community on bebo and LiveJournal and the Canterbury Crusaders on blurty, DeadJournal and Dreamwidth are not really big enough to compare age wise as the biggest has three people listing age.  49% or 25 identify as male, 29% or 15 people identify as female and 22% or 11 do not identify as a gender.  Compared to the Queensland Reds bebo community where all 6 identify as male, this community has a huge female population.

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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.

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The team has been discussed in an earlier post about the size of the ANZ Championship community on Twitter.  This post will look into the specific community dedicated to the New South Wales Swifts on LiveJournal, bebo and Yahoo!Groups.

There is one group dedicated to the Sydney Swifts on Yahoo!Groups.  It was created on May 16, 2001 and currently has 50 members.  The group has been neglected and been the subject of spam starting in 2005.  Prior to that, discussion on the list had ended in March 2002 (with the admin having deleted three spam e-mails in November 2003).  There were 84 legitimate posts to the list in this period.  Graphing it, the posting volume looks like:

This posting pattern is similar to that of the some of the less active AFL teams on Yahoo!Groups.  I joined the list to find out membership demographic information.  Only eleven of the current members joined when there was active posting to the list.  Ten people joined in the period with no posting, and the other 29 joined during periods of active spamming.   Of the 50, only four listed their demographic information.  When the list was active, the person who listed their age has 21, female and Australian.  After the period of active spam, the three people listing demographic information were all male and older.  Of the two who listed their country of residence, neither listed Australia.    (For the totals on Yahoo!Groups on my chart, this will listed at 50, despite the the fact that  only 21 or so are probably legitimately interested in the team.  At the moment, I do not have the time and ability to join every team related mailing list to determine who is and is not a legitimate poster based on join date.)

On LiveJournal, there are two people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest.  Of the two, one updated a week ago, is 22 and from New South Wales.  The other has not updated in 162 weeks and does not list a country of residence.

There are four people who list the Sydney Swifts as an interest on bebo and zero who list the New South Wales Swifts as an interest.  Only one lists their age, 20.  The other three list their location and all are based i New South Wales.

The community on Twitter is the largest, with 90 people following the official team account.  Facebook, surprisingly, has no one listing the team as an interest.  Yahoo!Groups probably legitimately had the second largest following with 21 if we only count back in the day.  The fact that bebo and LiveJournal both have bigger interest than Facebook is also surprising.

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So far, the only other NRL team on blogger that has been looked at is the Brisbane Broncos.  That team has 12 people who listed them as an interest.  In comparison, the Wests Tigers have ten people who list them as an interest.  That they are so close is a bit surprising as Roy Morgan Research indicates that the fanbase for the Wests Tigers is substantially smaller than that of the Broncos.

Of the ten West Tigers fans, seven are from Australia, one from New Zealand, one from the United Kingdom and one who does not identify their country of origin.  Compared to other NRL teams, the percentage of Australians is low: 100% of Brisbane Broncos fans on blogger and Dreamwidth are all Australian, 100% of Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal are Australians, 85.7% of Canterbury Bulldogs fans on LiveJournal are Australian, 81.1% of Broncos fans on LiveJournal are Australian.  Of the networks and teams sampled, only the Broncos community on bebo has a smaller percentage, 71.1%, of Australians.

Of the Australians, three are from Queensland and three are from New South Wales.  This makes as these states are strong holds of Rugby League.  Added to that, Melbourne and Sydney have traditionally had a rivalry so you wouldn’t necessary expect a Victorian fan population.

The astrological sign data is really interesting and would be more interesting if it the samples were larger to see if some sort of statement could be made about a team’s fanbase.  That said, six people list their date of birth for Blogger to calculate their astrological sign.  Three are Leos, and with one person being a Cancer, Capricorn and Pisces.

Seven of the ten fans list their age, with two of these being obviously incorrect; a person cannot be 253 years old.   If those two are ignored, the average age of a Wests Tigers fan on blogger is 28.8 and a median age of 22.  This average makes the team’s fans older than some of the other NRL team fans on networks that I’ve looked at including Broncos fans on bebo and LiveJournal,  Canterbury Bulldogs fans on LiveJournal and Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal.  The only team and network with a higher average is the Broncos community on blogger.  The above average age compared to other fan populations may end up being a result of people self selecting networks based on age: the youngest fans prefer bebo, fans in their mid 20s prefer LiveJournal and older fans prefer blogging.  As we age or as a result of a generational gap, we might prefer going from shorter method of communicating to a longer one.

Seven people list their gender as male, two as female and one does not identify their gender.  This is higher percentage of male fans than  the Broncos on either bebo or blogger.

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That out of the way, this post will look at the size of the Canterbury Bulldogs fan community on LiveJournal.   The Bulldogs are part of the National Rugby League and are based in Sydney.  (On LiveJournal clones like blurty, Dreamwidth Studios, InsaneJournal and JournalFen, no one lists Canterbury Bulldogs or Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs as an interest.  Therefor, it is impossible to talk about them.)  As of January 11, 2010, twenty-six people list the Canterbury Bulldogs as an interest.

Four of the twenty-six have updated in the last month.  Another five have updated in the last year.   One has never updated.  This lack of recent updating is a bit higher than the percentage wise than the Melbourne Storm community.

Twelve of the twenty-six list their year of birth.   The average year of birth is 1985, and the median and mode year of birth is 1987.  This puts their fanbase on LiveJournal at an average age of about a year younger than their counterpart fans who like the Melbourne Storm.

Twenty-one people list their country of residence.  Eighteen are from Australia, with one each from Jamaica, New Zealand and the United States.  85.7% are Australian.  The percentage of Australians is higher than Brisbance Broncos fans on bebo (71.1% Aussie), Brisbane Bronco fans on LiveJournal (81.1%), Brisbane Broncos fans on Twitter (67.6%).  It is lower than Brisbane Broncos fans on blogger (100%) and Dreamwidth (100%) and Melbourne Storm fans on LiveJournal (100%).

Of the eighteen Australians, sixteen of them list their state of residence: Fourteen from New South Wales, one from Queensland and one from Victoria.  When compared to the Brisbane Broncos, Balmain Tigers, Cronulla Sharks, Melbourne Storm, North Sydney Bears, and St. George Dragons fans on LiveJournal, this team draws most heavily from New South Wales.   The second most popular team in New South Wales on LiveJournal based on the aforementioned teams is the Melbourne Storm, with seven people from the state.

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LiveJournal is the most popular service, easily beating out all the clones with 25 people listing the team as an interest.  (There are no communities dedicated to the team though.)   Dreamwidth is the second most popular service with two users.  Blurty and DeadJournal come in third with one user each.   There are no fans on InsaneJournal, Inksome or JournalFen.  CrazyLife appears to be down so no numbers can be found there.

For this community, the blurty and DeadJournal fans are not active on the service: Neither have updated in the past 200 plus weeks.  On Dreamwidth, one updated in the last week and one last updated 34 weeks ago.  On LiveJournal, seven updated in the past week, seven have updated in the past six months, ten haven’t updated in the past year and a half and one has never updated.

When combined, eleven of the twenty-nine users have listed their year of birth.   The average year of birth was 1984.45, with a median and mode year of birth at 1985.  Twenty-six of the twenty-nine list their country of residence.  Unsurprisingly, all are from Australia. Thirteen are from Victoria, seven are from New South Wales and three are from Queensland.

From LiveJournal and its clones, I’ve collected data on the distribution of fans of the Melbourne Storm,  Brisbane Broncos, Balmain Tigers (defunct), Cronulla Sharks, North Sydney Bears (defunct), and St. George Dragons (defunct) based on listing of the team as an interest.  The following chart shows the comparative distribution of fans of the aforementioned teams on LiveJournal and its clones.  It might be a bit hard to tell from this chart but Queensland has 25 people total, New South Wales has 20, Victoria has 15 and the ACT has 7.

The Storm dominate in their home state of Victoria. They take a majority in New South Wales but are largely absent from the ACT.  This is some what surprising as the Storm are supposed to be the second most popular team in the league and the ACT is a melting pot of people from all the other states.

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I checked out all the LiveJournal clones to see if anyone listed Cumberland as an interest.  Nope.  None.  I checked Facebook.  Facebook says that there are less than 20 fans of Cumberland from Australia.  That makes sense.  The North Sydney Bears and the Balmain Tigers have people interested in them on Facebook.  (But not the Glebe Dirty Reds, Newtown Jets, Western Suburbs Magpies.)  Then I checked LiveJournal.  LiveJournal has 42 people who list Cumberland as an interest.  This number is not accurate.  A quick look at some of the people confirms it as Cumberland is a city in Pennsylvania and Iowa and Indiana and Main, in England, and in Canada.  It also is a well known CTA stop on Chicago’s El.  The number for LiveJournal thus goes down as a zero, despite the fact that it doesn’t quite line up with the actual total.

Edited to add: This also applies for University, a team active from 1920-1937 .

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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.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian clubs and teams on Twitter
• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
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• Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers

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.

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Looking around, the Australian baseball community does not appear to have a stronghold on social networks like bebo,blogger or LiveJournal.  They do however have a small presence on Twitter: The extent of which is the account run by the Perth Heat.  The team has 35 followers.  Twitter Analyzer seems a bit off with their count for where followers come from for the team.  It says that the Heat have 36 American followers, 4 Dutch followers, 4 Irish followers, 12 followers from Ecuador and 32 followers from Australians.  Stats like those are why I have a huge problem with Twitter Analyzer but I’m not sure what tool does a better job at counting.  The Perth Heat do a fairly good job at updating regularly, providing scores, links to updated rosters and their social profiles elsewhere.  (They link to their Facebook fanpage, where they have 1,110 fans.)  The one thing they don’t do particularly well is interact.

It seems like Twitter would be a great potential tool for Claxton Shield and its teams to market itself as Twitter ranks 12th in Australia according to Alexa.  Second tier sports should definitely contemplate using it, in combination with YouTube and Facebook, to promote themselves so they can reach a wider audience.  People can accidentally find their content through @ replies, retweets, related videos that can help develop more organic interest in them.  If Australia is ever going to get another league like ABL and IBLA and have it be successful, this sort of thing needs to be done.

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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.

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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:

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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.

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This posts looks at the size of community for the Adelaide Crows on LiveJournal and Blogger.  Posts about both these networks will be separate based on teams because getting data the data sets for the AFL are too difficult to mine by hand in a timely manner. The size of the individual team communities on these two services is also bigger than the size of the total AFL community on some of the LiveJournal clones.  Data for LiveJournal was gathered on December 24, 2009.  Data for Blogger was collected on December 29, 2009.

77 users Adelaide Crows as an interest on LiveJournal.  This community is more active on the site than their counterparts on LiveJournal clones with 14 people who have updated in the past week and 28 total who have updated in the past year.  Only 5 have never updated.  Of the 77 users, 25 list their year of birth.  For the group, the mean is 1984, median is 1985 and mode is 1988.  Like the clones, most of the community for this team is based in South Australia with 59% of 44 of the 55 people listing it as their state of residence.  There is a small population representing other Australian states: 4 from Victoria, 3 from New South Wales, 2 from Queensland, 1 from Tasmania and the Northern Territory.  In addition to the Australia, two people from the United States include the team as an interest.  One of them is from California and the other is from Arizona.

The community of people listing the Adelaide Crows, or Adelaide and another footy related interest, on Blogger is small with only 16 people.  This is much smaller than the community on LiveJournal.  One of the things that can be determined with the Blogger population is the male to female ratio in the community.  For the Adelaide Crows, 6 people identify as female, 8 as male and 4 do not identify.  10 people list their age on blogger.  Of these, one is an obvious incorrect age as 253 years old is not possible.  Of the other 9,  the mean age is 25, and the median and mode age is 20.   The youngest is 16 an the oldest is 59.  11 people list their a birth date, which blogger displays as an astrological sign.  In this group, 3 are Pisces, 2 are Aries, Capricorns and Gemini, and 1 are Libras and Taurus.  In terms of location, all but two are from Australia.  Of those two, one is from the United States and one does not list a country of residence.  For the 16 Australians, 8 are from South Australia, 2 are from Victoria and 1 are from New South Wales, Queensland and Western Australia.

With six networks, the geographic picture of this community indicated that the team’s base is very much that of South Australia.

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Do communities for the AFL exist on other LiveJournal clones?  The answer is yes, but for the vast majority of them, they do not.  This post examines LiveJournal clones and some of their characteristics.  It identifies those networks which have people with an interest in the AFL and then does a deeper examination of those networks.

Outside of JournalFen and DeadJournal, there a number of LiveJournal clones.  These include asks.jp, blurty, CrazyLife, Dreamwidth Studios, Inksome, InsaneJournal, Ivanovo, IziBlog, Kraslan, OpenWeblog, Scribbld, Sviesta Ciba and ????????.  Each of these caters to a unique audience with its own history.

About half of these are non-English based service.  They include asks.jp targeted at a Japanese audience that does not rank for Australian visitors.  It also includes Ivanovo which is geared at a Russian speaking audience and does not rank for an Australian audience.  Kraslan and ???????? are bot clones aimed at Russian speakers that did not rank for on Alexa for Australian visitors.  Sviesta Ciba is a Latvian language based LiveJournal clone that does not rank on Alexa for Australian visitors.  Unsurprisingly, none of these non-English based LiveJournal clones have a community that expresses interest in the Australian Football League.  (Or the National Rugby League for that matter.)

The English speaking LiveJournal clones include blurty, CrazyLife, Dreamwidth Studios, Inksome, InsaneJournal, IziBlog, OpenWeblog and Scribbld.  Blurty was one of the most popular LiveJournal clones that was most active five to six years ago and for a while was one of a series of clones used by fandom_wank.  Its traffic has since fallen off a cliff and it has only had 715 users update in the past 24 hours on December 24.  It does not rank on Alexa for Australian traffic.  CrazyLife is a small LiveJournal clone that only had 5 accounts updated in the past 24 hours and only 62 of its 44,323 accounts include Australians.  Dreamwidth Studios is a new LiveJournal clone that launched in May 2009 and caters mostly to a media fandom audience. Of the 468044 accounts on December 27, only 1,797 list Australian as their country of residence.  According to Alexa on December 28, the site ranks as 7,337 in Australia.  Inksome was originally founded as scribblit and was the first LiveJournal clone created specifically in response to LiveJournal’s Strikethrough event in May 2007.  It catered a bit to LiveJournal media fandom and never really took off.  As of December 27, 2009, it had only 79 accounts that had been active in the last 24 hours and only 138 of 30,323 accounts list the country of residence as Australia.  The site does not rank in Australia.  InsaneJournal is one of the most popular LiveJournal clones.  As of December 27, 2009, 3,174 active accounts or 890 more active accounts than Dreamwidth.  The site has fewer Australians, with only 910 users listing Australia as their country of residence.  Alexa ranks the site as 4,885 in Australia. Iziblog is a small LiveJournal clone that had only 8 accounts updated in the 24 hour period around December 24, 2009 and did not rank on Alexa for Australian sites.  OpenWeblog is a tiny LiveJournal clone with only 3,780 total accounts, of which two had been updated in the 24 hour period on December 27, 2009 and the site does not rank in Australia.  Scribbld is another small LiveJournal clone.  It has 33,343 accounts as of December 27, 2009 of which 77 of those accounts were active in the last 24 hours.  Only 32 of those accounts list their ountry of residence as Australia, where the traffic does not rank on Alexa.

Of these clones, Blurty, CrazyLife, Dreamwidth Studios, Inksome, and InsaneJournal had communities which listed AFL as an interest.  None of the others, as of December 24, 2009, listed AFL as an interest, neither were teams listed as interests on these services.

28 people list the AFL as an interest on blurty.  Of these, only two people are from the United States and one does not list a country.  The rest are Australians.  Of these, seven list their year of birth.  The median year of birth is 1982.7, median is 1984 and mode is 1985.  None of these users have updated recently, with the most recent update happening 196 weeks ago and five of them never having updated.  They represent a number of states: 8 from Victoria, 3 from New South Wales, 2 from South Australia, Queensland and the ACT, 1 from Tasmania and Western Australia, and 4 Australians who did not list a state of residence.  Blurty has four teams where people list them as an interest.  They include the Adelaide Crows, the Brisbane Lions, the North Melbourne Kangaroos and the Sydney Swans.  The Swans have three fans who list them as an interest, the Lions have two fans, and the North Melbourne Kangaroos and Adelaide Crows both have one fan who lists them as an interest.  This represents a total of seven individuals.  With the exception of the Swans and one fan, all the fans are from the state that the team plays in.

CrazyLife has five people who list AFL as an interest.  Three of these are the same person.  Two are from South Australia and one does not list a state.  One lists an age of 1985 and the other 1986. Of the three, the most recent update was 234 weeks ago.  Two people list specific teams as an interest: One listing the Fremantle Dockers and the Hawthorn Hawks, the other with three accounts listing the Adelaide Crows.

Twelve people list the AFL as an interest on Dreamwidth Studios.  Of these, three are from Victoria, two are from New South Wales and Queesnland and one is from Western Australia.  Only three of these twelve accounts have updated in the last week.  Two have been been updated and five have not been updated in the past 28 weeks or more.    There are four teams that are listed as interests: The Adelaide Crows with five people, Brisbane lions with one person, the Fremantle Dockers with one person and the Brisbane Lions with one person.  The Adelaide Crows may have the largest group of fans but only one has updated in the past twenty weeks.  The fan of the Brisbane Lions has never updated.  The Fremantle Dockers fan updated in the past week.  The fan of the Sydney Swans last updated 32 weeks ago.

The Inksome community had one user from South Australia who listed the AFL and the Adelaide Crows as an interest.  They have never posted a blog entry on their inksome account.

On InsaneJournal, fifteen people list the AFL as an interest.  Of these, one lists the US as their country of residence and are clearly a fan of the American Arena Football League.  The other does not list a country and it cannot be determined by other information available on their profile. Of the remaining thirteen, Three are from Western Australia, two are from Victoria and one is from Queensland.  The rest do not list their state of residence.  One last updated in the past week. Another last updated eleven weeks ago   Four have never updated.  Four last updated between 85 and 124 weeks ago. Six last updated between 41 and 58 weeks ago. Five people list their year of birth: 1982, 1983, 1984, 1985 and 1986. Twelve people list interest in nine teams: Three for the Adelaide Crows, one for the Brisbane Lions, two for the Freemantle Dockers, one for the Hawthorn Hawks, one for the North Melbourne Kangaroos, one for the St. Kilda Saints, three for the West Coast Eagles and one for the Western Bulldogs.  There are several fans of teams located outside their home state: The Fremantle Dockers have a fan from Victoria, the North Melbourne Kangaroo have a fan from Western Australia and the Western Bulldogs have a fan from Minnesota in the United States.  With the exception of one Fremantle Dockers fan, none of the people listing specific teams as interest has updated earlier than 48 weeks ago and five of those have never updated.

The AFL community on LiveJournal clones, expressed by listing the AFL as an interest, looks like this when all the different networks are looked at together:

One of the problems with this little analysis is that there are often inconsistent uses of a team’s name that can make it hard to distinguish fans of a team from a city or another sports team.  For example, people might include Brisbane or Lions as an interest when they are actually fans of the Brisbane Lions.  As both are so common, it is a problem when trying to compile a data set like this.  What it means is that in actuality, the fan base for a team might actually be larger than the listing of interests indicates.  In general, it is why I tend to use membership in communities dedicated to a source to evaluate a community’s size and interest on a LiveJournal clone.  This is problematic as these clones are so small that they do not have a user base that is interested in creating communities for their teams.  With larger social networking sites or dedicated sites, this should be less problematic and the data should be more reliable.

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I was interested to see the size and shape of the Australian Football League community on DeadJournal. To do this, I went to the Interest Search using AFL and each current and past team in the AFL. 13 people list AFL as an interest. Not all of these individuals are necessarily interested in the Australian Football League. The AFL also stands for the Arena Football League, a defunct indoor American football. It is possible that people listing AFL as an interest could be referencing this league, especially as the league formally folded this year. (It was in hiatus the previous year as a result of the economic downturn.)

Of the 13 people listing AFL as an interest, only two were Americans. Three people did not list what country they lived in. The other eight people were from Australia. Of these Australians, two were from Western Australia, two were from Victoria, two were from South Australia, one was from Queensland and one did not list a state.

Six of the eight Australians listed their year of birth. The mean, median and mode year of birth for these DeadJournal members was 1985. That puts their age at around 24 years.

The DeadJournal people listing AFL as an interest are not very active on the service any more. The most recent update of a journal by some one listing AFL as an interest was 66 weeks ago. That is 15 months ago. The mean last update for these 8 users was 309 weeks or almost 6 years ago. The median last update was 345 weeks or 366 weeks or 6 years and 7 months ago.

The community for specific teams is even smaller than general interest in the AFL. Of the sixteen current teams and three former teams, only three teams have people listing them as an interest. These teams are Collingwood Magpies, Port Adelaide Power, and the Western Bulldogs. Each of those teams has one person listing them as an interest and none list the AFL as an interest. All of those fans are from Melbourne, Victoria. The most recent update was for the Collingwood fan, who last updated 323 weeks ago. The Collingwood fan does not list a year of birth. The Port Adelaide Power fan lists a year of birth of 1987. The Western Bulldogs fan lists a year of birth of 1986.

The community for the AFL, based on interests, is small, young, Australian based and has been inactive for over three years. It will be interesting to see how this LiveJournal clone compares to others like Blurty, Dreamwidth Studios, InsaneJournal and JournalFen.

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