Ozzie Sport

I’m playing with Microsoft MapPoint. It is pretty awesome, except for the fact that some smaller cities don’t register. Anyway, I finished compiling the location of all fans of ANZ Champship teams on bebo, blogger, LiveJournal and LiveJournal clones. Interest in this particular competition is small compared to the NRL, AFL and A-League. For a few people, fans didn’t list a city which makes getting an accurate idea of where fans are difficult. Two cities didn’t appear as they were really, really rural so they were excluded. I took this data and the output was the following map.

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.

Related Posts:

• ANZ Championship on Facebook’s fanpages and groups
• ANZ Championship on Facebook
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

The Canterbury Crusaders are a Christchurch, New Zealand rugby team that play in the Super 14 competition. They are discussed here because the competition includes teams from Australia.  For more information on the Super 14, please read Wikipedia’s article.

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.

Related Posts:

• Socceroos: A creative research data dump (part 3)
• Melbourne Storm on LiveJournal and its clones
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs on LiveJournal

I’m slowly trying to get through bebo, like I went through blogger.  I didn’t do these communities earlier because on the whole, bebo communities are bigger.  (I’m putting off LiveJournal even longer because they are about the same size as bebo and each individual profile needs to be viewed get year of birth and location.)  This posts looks at the people who list the Canberra Raiders as an interest on bebo.  The Raiders are National Rugby League team that were founded in 1982. On bebo, 83 people list the team as an interest.

Of these 83,  11 are female (13%), 51 are male (61%) and 21  do not list a gender (25%).   44 list their age.  They have an average age of 23.38, median age of 21 and mode of 19.  This is about 10 years younger than their counterparts on blogger where 5 people list their age for a 34 and median age of 32.5.  (This supports and argument made earlier that there may be age related factors for where a team’s fans congregate.)

46 of the 83 list their place of residence.  Most Raiders fans are Australian, with 42 from the country.  In addition, there are 3 fans from New Zealand and 1 from the United Kingdom. 41 of the 42 Australians list a location where their state of residence can be figured out.  20 are from New South Wales, 10 are from the ACT where the Raiders are based, 9 are from Queensland, 1 is from Victoria and 1 is from Western Australia. The 10 people from the ACT are the largest total following of any team on any network that I have examined so far.  The second closest total is 5 for the Cronulla Sharks on LiveJournal.  Of the 20 from New South Wales, several are from towns outside Sydney where they might do not have an NRL team.  They include one person each from  Batemans Bay, Dubbo, Gilgandra, Harden, Tullibigeal and Stockton, and two from Tumut.  That representation inside New South Wales lends a bit more of a regional feel than if just the ACT is looked at though that much (17 total if Stockon, north of Sydney, is ignored).  The problem with the ACT is the population tends to sometimes view itself as more transient than in other parts of the country.  This could imply that the team should have a wider fan base as people take their love of the team with them when they leave… or more narrow as people who are fans only become fans and only maintain their fannishness for a team while they live in the ACT.  It is hard to tell.

Related Posts:

• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location
• Wests Tigers on blogger

The New South Wales Swifts were originally the Sydney Swifts and part of the Commonwealth Bank Trophy.  When the event change and became the ANZ Championship and became more of a state versus state netball competition, the team’s name change.  The team names are used interchangably here depending on the original usage.

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.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?
• Online Activity in the Wake of the Melbourne Storm Controversy
• Distribution of Australian sports fans by league and location

This post looks at the size of the Wests Tigers community on blogger.  The Wests Tigers are a Sydney based National Rugby League team.  The team is relatively new, having been founded in 2000 as a merger of the Balmain Tigers and the Western Suburbs Magpies.

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.

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

I should probably stick to patterns with these posts, completing all the NRL or AFL teams for a network before switching another network, league or team.  I’m just not capable of doing that at the moment.  If you want to keep up with what I am doing data wise with specific leagues, teams and networks, I suggest you use the categories to find posts.  Category navigation can be found on the menu bar.  When you use your mouse to hover over a category, a menu should drop down with more options.

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.

Related Posts:

• Melbourne Storm on LiveJournal and its clones
• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups

The Melbourne Storm are a member of the National Rugby League, having joined in 1998.  This post will look at the size and location of Melbourne Storm the community on LiveJournal and its clones.

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.

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Data dump: Australian sport on LiveJournal and its clones
• Socceroos: A creative research data dump (part 3)

This is less a blog post and more almost a note to myself.  I was looking at the size of defunct National Rugby League teams on LiveJournal, its clones and Facebook.  One team I am looking at now is Cumberland.   This particular team lasted only eight games in the league that predated the National Rugby League.  Nonetheless, I checked them out because sometimes you get people who are less sports fans passionate about their teams performance now; you get people who love the history of older teams and the game in an earlier era.  In the United States (which is admittedly not Australia), there are people who love teams from the Negro League and All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.  Thus, it is conceivable that you might get people fan of a team like Cumberland.

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 .

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Gold Coast Titans on bebo
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts

The following chart is based on the data gathered for posts to date.  It is intended to give a general idea as to the comparative size of various sports fandom communities to each other.  Blanks indicate that no data regarding that team on the service has been gathered; it does not indicate a size of zero for that particularly service.  If you would like specific data regarding a team on a service to understand where that number of coming from, please comment or e-mail me at laura[at]fanhistory[dot]com.  I am more than happy to explain it.

Leagues with teams at the bottom include AFL, AHL, A-League, Claxton Shield, Gridiron Australia Nationals, KFC Twenty20 Big Bash, NBL, Rugby League/State of Origin, Victorian Amateur Football Association.  The AFL’s expansion team puts one of their teams in the bottom 10.  Soccer teams, baseball teams, American/Gridiron football, basketball, netball, rugby union, ice hockey, rugby league and Australian rules football are at the bottom.  Some of these sports can be accounted for because of they are not popular sports in the country.  Others can be accounted for because the teams are part of secondary leagues and competitions.  It will be interesting to see how and if popularity shifts as more data is added from additional networks.

Edited to add: This post mostly came about as I needed to take a break from gathering Yahoo!Groups data.  The directory currently is not working for me.  It limits my ability to data gather as a result.  Two of the big things in terms of moving a team up or down the above list are Facebook and Twitter.  Facebook has a lot of voids and that’s easy enough to fill in.  I did that.  Things at the bottom didn’t change much but things at the top really did change with four clubs above the 40,000 fans threshold.

Given the huge leaps there, I cannot really foresee the top order changing much, especially as the Twitter data is already there. The other social networks out there just do not have populations to provide an audience that size. Facebook claims that 7,680,420 people are from Australia on its service. When 50,000 list their interest as the Magpies or the Blues, well, that’s .6% of all Australians on Facebook. Or put another way, 3 out of every 500 Australians on the site list one of those two teams as an interest. For a sports team, that seems really high and about on par for the most popular sports team in other countries. (The New York Yankees have about 785,000 fans for an American population of about 101,468,000 on Facebook. That puts the percentage at about .7%.)

Yahoo!Groups doesn’t have a large population. While bebo is popular in Australia, it doesn’t provide numbers even close to this. The only way to get numbers that large are to find community specific sites which require registration.

More edited to add: One of the things I did not realize with the various data sets I’ve been compiling is that about a third of the teams in the National Rugby League aren’t included. My bad. Most of my focus has been on the AFL. Hence, the oversight. I’ve compiled that again and rather than update with a third image, just going to say that there have been no major shake ups. The Brisbane Broncos remain on thop. The St. George Dragons are at the bottom with 240 fans. Second to last are the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs with 1,580. No team really has the big number of fans that the AFL has.

More editing: I normally tried variations of a team’s name for Facebook to make sure I get the highest number.  In the case of St. George Illawarra Dragons, I goofed and got the one that listed 240.  When I used St Geoergillawarra Dragons combed with St. George Illawarra Dragons, I got 9,200.  This change will show up in any future data analysis.  The collection date has always been changed to today just so I know when I got that number.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)

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

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

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

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

Related Posts:

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