Ozzie Sport

Flickr is a photo sharing site owned by Yahoo. According to Alexa, it is the 36th most popular site on the Internet and 30th most popular in Australia. Flickr has made it easy for people to upload their pictures on the move by creating mobile applications that allow sharing from phone’s camera.

To get an idea for the popularity of Flickr in Australia and New Zealand, a search was done for Australia in the pictures search section. It had 5,856,165 results. A search for Sydney had 2,678,431 results. A search for New Zealand had 2,136,668 results. The interest in taking pictures of both countries is high.

Interest in sport is also high. A search for all the AFL teams results in around 200 to 500 images each. There are several groups on Flickr specifically dedicated to the league and its teams. The generic term surf Australia has 73,441 results, demonstrating that interest goes beyond traditional professional sports and into niche sport and participation sports. Sport organizations inside Australia have begun to realize its value: Canoeing Australia has set up its own Flickr account to upload pictures.

Why are picture sites like Flickr important? What can they tell us about Australian and Kiwi women’s sport? They are important because they help grow the visibility of the sport. Well composed, beautiful pictures can help really sell sport in a way that text, the primary method of sharing on most of the sites referenced so far, cannot. This visibility could translate into ticket and event sales: These women play so beautifully I should check them out in person. Beyond that aspect, Flickr can also help identify what type of content that people are interested in based on the type of pictures they take. This group can thus be catered to more by creating events or providing similar content on a team or athlete’s internet stream. If there are a lot of event pictures, have a meet up for Flickr and Picassa users during a practice session where they are invited to take pictures of athletes in motion. If there are a lot of pictures that are like head shots and traditional promotional images, then a consideration should be made to include more of that content and make it available where online users can access it. Both of these require a bit of content analysis but a most people will be looking at only only team or a few athletes, this becomes much more feasible.

Pictures can also be useful in terms of identifying potential employees. If there are one or two people who take beautiful pictures, they might be worth contacting to see if they can be brought in in an official capacity. Their work sells the team or athlete already, but by doing that, you help add validation to their work which might get them a bigger audience. This in turn can lead to increased visibility for the team or athlete as each party gets the benefit of the other’s audience.

Beyond the issues above, another way of understanding photographer interest in women’s sport involves the total search results, which when compared to other teams can be useful. It gives another perspective on the comparative interest amongst the more creative classes of Internet users and the kind who get out into the real world to engage in the things that they love. Group results and total members to those groups provides perspective on the total comparative audience for the work of photographers.

The table below includes data from all the total search results found by searching Flickr for total number of images related to a keyword. It is sorted by league and then team. It highlights the popularity of swimming in Australia, though the search results rarely refer to Swimming Australia sanctioned events or Australian swimmers who compete internationally. The W-League results are extremely high and undoubtedly include pictures from the American league with the same name. When looking at individual teams, it appears that the ANZ Championship, W-League and WNBL all have comparative levels of interest. The Australian Women’s Ice Hockey League has zero results and there is obviously much less interest in it.

The table below includes the results when searching for groups related to Australian and New Zealand women’s sport. The total search results is small and there are no relevant groups. This suggests a couple of possible things. First, that while people are interested in taking pictures of women’s sport, they do not see their primary interests being focused around organizing people around women’s sport. Second, being photographers of specific women’s sport is not part of their internalized identity in such a way that they need to continually affirm it. Third, that Flickr may not have a large audience for specific Australian and New Zealand women’s sport that the upload totals might suggest is there.

Related Posts:

• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

Alexa ranks websites based on worldwide traffic.  If a site is popular in certain countries, it may also be ranked in those countries.  This data is gathered using toolbars that people on the web download and install. Some Australian tech people doubt the accuracy of the numbers for Australia as the toolbar is not widely installed.  Working on this assumption, most of the people in Australia and New Zealand who use the toolbar are people who are involved with online market, search engine optimization or some other group where website rankings matter. (This could be employees of a particular company installing the toolbar so that when they visit a site, it gets more views and thus the rank goes up.)
Still given the toolbar install limitations, Alexa is included to provide another perspective.   In terms of Australian and New Zealand’s women sport, this perspective is tech friendly people’s interest in women’s sport.  This group could be important to attract to as they are more likely to be involved with social media, social bookmarking and other forms of engagement online.
Assuming that Alexa’s toolbar is installed evenly amongst various groups of sport fans, Alexa’s perspective is best in terms of defining interest relative to other teams.  How popular is say netball compared to women’s swimming or basketball or cricket?  Alexa is also useful for determining when interest in a team peaks, and to find out of if this interest over time mirrors when competitions happen and big news is released.
There is a major limitation for using Alexa to gauge the comparative interest in women’s sport and that involves how women’s sport is organized.  In the case of the W-League, the W-League’s official page forwards to the A-League site.  For all teams but the Canberra United, the team pages are embedded inside the site for the men’s team and it is impossible to differentiate traffic between the two.  While this could be seen as good for women’s sport fandom by trying to get audience share from the men, it also is a bit unfair as those pages often aren’t updated as often and do not share equal space and visibility on a site.  Beyond that, it is just impossible to track interest in women’s sport separately and it makes it harder to justify say sponsorship for a women’s club alone.
The Alexa data is broken down by league in order to give a better perspective regarding the comparative performance of each team in the league.

ANZ Championship

Looking at this table, it clearly shows that when the season is going on, there is increased traffic to the site.  Teams do not maintain their traffic levels during the off season.  This data would have been better had it contained information regarding website rank during the Commonwealth Games to see if there was a bump in interest during that period.

Australian Cycling Federation

This table includes both the Australian Cycling Federation and Rachel Neylan, a female Australian cyclist. Interest in Neylan is nowhere near the level of the federation that she’s part of. Her ranking is very low and suggests that she like gets less than a thousand visits a month. In November, interest in her dropped completely off. This is probably because there are not any major competitions which she has taken part in that have occurred in the past three months.

AWIHL

The AWIHL season is currently going on. Most of the teams have their own websites hosted on their own domains. The possible exception is the Melbourne Ice, who are not included. Ice hockey in Australia is a small sport, with a niche audience for both participants and fans, and few facilities when compared to sports like netball and cricket. Opportunities for women are even small. Given these issues, it is not surprising that the team sites do rank at all in Australia and do not rank internationally.

Netball Australia

The domain here is for the netball federation in Australia. It suffers the same issue as the ANZ Championship data: It doesn’t really measure the impact of the Commonwealth Games in terms of traffic. It does demonstrate overall more interest in the national team than in the premiere women’s competition. This likely suggests that support for the national team does not translate into interest in the league. If that is true, it is a fundamental problem for the game that the federation and league should work on.

Netball New Zealand
The table below represents a the Netball New Zealand federation and a local club side that plays in New Zealand. Neither has a rank in New Zealand. Given that, it could be surmised that comparatively speaking, netball is less popular population wise in New Zealand than in Australia. How accurate this is could be debatable as the NRL team for New Zealand often fails to rank inside New Zealand. Alexa may just not be as good in New Zealand as it is in Australia. That said, it looks like Netball New Zealand is more popular now than when the ANZ Championship was going on. This could possibly be a residual effect from the Commonwealth Games, where the Kiwis took gold.

Swimming Australia
Stephanie Rice’s site represents female interest in swimming. Stephanie is active on social networks like Twitter. In September 2010, she was involved in a major controversy for her use of the word faggot on Twitter. In October 2010, she attended a major Australian Rugby Union event. For better or worse, these two events really raised her profile. Data for Swimming Australia is provided in order to give context to Stephanie’s numbers.

Tennis Australia
Tennis Australia is represented here by Sam Stosur. The number of dates information was collected is extremely limited but it suggests that interest peaked during the northern summer, when interest in tennis is at its highest.

W-League
Measuring interest in the W-League using Alexa is difficult. The W-League domain redirects to the A-League page and only the Canberra United have an official site located on their own domain. Contrary to expectations, the start of the W-League season did not result in increased traffic to the United site.

WNCL

The WNCL is the premiere cricket competition for state teams in Australia. Data has only been found for the Victorian Spirit. As the cricket season has gotten underway, the team has seen their traffic increase. Inside Australia, it does not appear to have become a top 100,000 site. Given that cricket is one of the more popular women sports, that they don’t rank higher, is a bit surprising.

Related Posts:

• Flickr and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Blogger and Australian/Kiwi women’s sport
• Most popular female Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)