I looked at the most popular teams on Facebook for the AFL. Now it is time for the NRL. The following is based on the official Facebook pages that are linked on a team’s official site. If a team is not listed, it is because they did not provide a link to their official Facebook page or provided a bad link. This data was gathered on April 6, 2010.
An updated version of this list can be found at Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
This is sorted by total number of followers. If an account is tagged (unofficial), it indicates that it is not the official account; it belongs to management, a player or a fansite. The list includes teams from most of the major sports leagues in Australia. Teams that play in those leagues that are not from Australia have also been included. Players were only counted as belonging to a team if they currently play for it. (Some players that are on NRL player lists have gone to play in Europe. They aren’t included.) The date that the information was collected is also included as these numbers actively change over time. If some one/team/organization is listed twice, it is because the data was collected on multiple dates.
Based on the somewhat data I have so far from Twitter, Facebook, LiveJournal and its clones, blogger and bebo, the Melbourne Victory are one of the most popular teams in Australia. They are only behind Collingwood Magpies, Carlton Blues, and the Queensland Maroons. A lot of this is attributed to the 46,620 people who list the team as an interest on Facebook and 1,432 people following the team on Twitter.
So far, only 28 teams have been looked at on blogger and here, the Victory fall in the middle of the pack with only 11 people listing them as an interest. Most of the sampling on the network has involved the AFL and Queensland based teams. Teams ahead of the Victory include Sydney Swans, Collingwood Magpies, West Coast Eagles, Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Lions, Geelong Cats, and the Western Bulldogs.
What does this small community look like? Of the eleven, nine list their country of residence. Of these nine, eight are Australians and one is likely an Australian who is currently traveling the United States. Of the nine Australians, seven list their state of origin and they are all from Victoria, six listing Melbourne as their home and one listing St. Kilda as theirs. This is a team that draws, at least on blogger, from where it is based and does not have a larger, national following.
Seven people list their age. For mean, median and mode, age is the same: 22. This is a relatively young fan community, especially when compared to a few of the AFL team communities on blogger. The community is also a more likely to be male with 6 people identifying as male, 3 identifying as female and 2 not identifying. Between the Adelaide Crows, Brisbane Broncos, Brisbane Bullets, Brisbane Lions, Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies, Essendon Bombers, Fremantle Dockers, Geelong Cats, Hawthorn Hawks, Melbourne Demons, and North Melbourne Kangaroos communities, only the Carlton Blues, Collingwood Magpies and Geelong Cats communities have a smaller female fanbase.
It will be interesting to see how this community eventually compares to other A-League teams on the network.
The following chart is based on the data gathered for posts to date. It is intended to give a general idea as to the comparative size of various sports fandom communities to each other. Blanks indicate that no data regarding that team on the service has been gathered; it does not indicate a size of zero for that particularly service. If you would like specific data regarding a team on a service to understand where that number of coming from, please comment or e-mail me at laura[at]fanhistory[dot]com. I am more than happy to explain it.
Leagues with teams at the bottom include AFL, AHL, A-League, Claxton Shield, Gridiron Australia Nationals, KFC Twenty20 Big Bash, NBL, Rugby League/State of Origin, Victorian Amateur Football Association. The AFL’s expansion team puts one of their teams in the bottom 10. Soccer teams, baseball teams, American/Gridiron football, basketball, netball, rugby union, ice hockey, rugby league and Australian rules football are at the bottom. Some of these sports can be accounted for because of they are not popular sports in the country. Others can be accounted for because the teams are part of secondary leagues and competitions. It will be interesting to see how and if popularity shifts as more data is added from additional networks.
Edited to add: This post mostly came about as I needed to take a break from gathering Yahoo!Groups data. The directory currently is not working for me. It limits my ability to data gather as a result. Two of the big things in terms of moving a team up or down the above list are Facebook and Twitter. Facebook has a lot of voids and that’s easy enough to fill in. I did that. Things at the bottom didn’t change much but things at the top really did change with four clubs above the 40,000 fans threshold.
Given the huge leaps there, I cannot really foresee the top order changing much, especially as the Twitter data is already there. The other social networks out there just do not have populations to provide an audience that size. Facebook claims that 7,680,420 people are from Australia on its service. When 50,000 list their interest as the Magpies or the Blues, well, that’s .6% of all Australians on Facebook. Or put another way, 3 out of every 500 Australians on the site list one of those two teams as an interest. For a sports team, that seems really high and about on par for the most popular sports team in other countries. (The New York Yankees have about 785,000 fans for an American population of about 101,468,000 on Facebook. That puts the percentage at about .7%.)
Yahoo!Groups doesn’t have a large population. While bebo is popular in Australia, it doesn’t provide numbers even close to this. The only way to get numbers that large are to find community specific sites which require registration.
More edited to add: One of the things I did not realize with the various data sets I’ve been compiling is that about a third of the teams in the National Rugby League aren’t included. My bad. Most of my focus has been on the AFL. Hence, the oversight. I’ve compiled that again and rather than update with a third image, just going to say that there have been no major shake ups. The Brisbane Broncos remain on thop. The St. George Dragons are at the bottom with 240 fans. Second to last are the Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs with 1,580. No team really has the big number of fans that the AFL has.
More editing: I normally tried variations of a team’s name for Facebook to make sure I get the highest number. In the case of St. George Illawarra Dragons, I goofed and got the one that listed 240. When I used St Geoergillawarra Dragons combed with St. George Illawarra Dragons, I got 9,200. This change will show up in any future data analysis. The collection date has always been changed to today just so I know when I got that number.
I’ve not really spent much time looking for fan communities for Australian sports teams on Facebook. This is for a couple of reasons. First, the data from Facebook’s Advertising Target Selection is often subject to wild fluctuations in the course of small periods of time. In the case of one search, there was a 200 person drop in ten minutes on a sample size of about 3,000. That’s pretty significant and calls into question all the data. The second reason is that it is hard to get data out of Facebook’s Advertising Target Selection. For LiveJournal, bebo and blogger, I might not be able to get all a user’s info but I have enough that I can easily tell you that the average Northern Territory fan of a team is this age. I can identify specific individuals and in some cases make educated guesses about the reliability of the data. With Facebook, all I get is a number based on the selection. If I want to find out how many female fans there of the Brisbane Lions from Queensland, I have to make a number of selections to get that number. (But I only get that based on city for Facebook, not state.) If I want to find out how many male fans there are, I have to go back to Facebook and make another series of selections. I can’t do that with in the context of my own data set compiled / exported from Facebook. This makes it really impossible to compile a complete listing of data in a timely manner. If I want to find out how many 18 year olds are fans of the Canberra Raiders, I have to make that selection one at a time. Aggravating.
Still, I wanted an idea of what is going on with Australia’s sports fandom on Facebook in terms of location and demographics. What I thus have is a load of random data. (Random data is random.) I tended to focus on cities and teams, with both chosen mostly at random. I can’t find an easy way to display or map this so the table is located below for you to look at.
Before that, some things I found interesting in this data:
Edited to add on January 9, 2010: I normally tried variations of a team’s name for Facebook to make sure I get the highest number. In the case of St. George Illawarra Dragons, I goofed and got the one that listed 240. When I used St Geoergillawarra Dragons combed with St. George Illawarra Dragons, I got 9,200. This change will show up in any future data analysis. The collection date has always been changed to today just so I know when I got that number.
This post is a series of posts looking at the size of Australian sports leagues on LiveJournal, its clones and other social networks. Earlier posts include Australian Football League on JournalFen , Australian Football League community on DeadJournal , National Rugby League on DeadJournal and JournalFen, Australian Football League on LiveJournal clones like Blurty, Dreamwidth Studios and InsaneJournal, Adelaide Crows community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger,and Official Australian Football League Twitter accounts and follower population by country. and Brisbane Lions community on LiveJournal, its clones and Blogger. Methodology for this post has been discussed in earlier posts.
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.
Rugby is traditionally more popular than footy in Queensland. The distribution in Queensland suggests something a bit different, with 89 total fans for the Lions versus 83 for the Broncos. Rugby and the Broncos are more popular only in New South Wales than footy and the Lions. One exception exists for the ACT where there are three fans for each.
Bearing in mind that people can be counted twice if they are one more than one network and are fans of more than one team, Brisbane sports fandom where the Australian state is known has the the largest interest base on bebo, with 272 people using it. Next is LiveJournal with 62 users, Blogger with 20, Blurty with 2 and InsaneJournal with 1. Brisbane fans in the ACT are more likely to use LiveJournal (3) with bebo (2) and blogger (2) being their next most popular choices. Victorian fans of Brisbane teams just prefer bebo (11) to LiveJournal (10) with their third choice being blogger. (2) In all other cases, bebo is the top choice in every state for Brisbane sports fans. Outside of Queensland, no other fans use or used blurty or InsaneJournal.
There is an international interest in Brisbane sports teams. This ranges from 0 to 50% of the total community that lists their country of origin. Communities with 50% of their support base outside Australia include the Queensland Red community on bebo, and the Brisbane Roar community on bebo. In both these cases, the community is 4 and 2 people respectively. 33.3% of the 30 member strong Queensland Maroons community on bebo comes from outside Australia, with 8 people from New Zealand and 2 from the Cook Islands. 32.4% of the Twitter followers of the Brisbane Broncos are from outside Australia with 13 from China, 68 from Great Britain and 286 from the United States. 28.9% of the Brisbane Broncos on bebo comes outside Australia with 32 people from New Zealand, 10 from Papau New Guinea, 6 from the United States, 2 from Fiji, the Philippines and Tonga. The Queensland Reds unofficial Twitter follow list has 28.6% of its followers from outside the US. 50 followers are the US, 36 from Great Britain, 9 from Brazil and New Zealand, and 4 from Denmark and Italy.
bebo, Blogger and LiveJournal all allow users to display their age on their profiles. This can help develop a picture of the age of the a team’s community online. There is a small problem in that not everyone lists their age and these populations are very, very small. Thus, this data cannot be really used to extrapolate beyond the specific community unless there is some other evidence to support that.
For the Brisbane Broncos community on blogger, the average age is 33, median is 31, mode is 20 with 9 of 12 people listing their ages. This is not close to LiveJournal’s Broncos community which has an average age of 25, median age of 27 and mode age of 20 with 13 of 42 people listing their age. The bebo community is much younger than both with an average age of 23, median age of 20 and mode age of 19 with 127 of 278 people listing their age. For the lions, 49 people list their page on bebo with an average age of 24.5, median age of 21, mode age of 18. On blogger, 10 Lions fans list their age. They have a average ago of 33, median age of 30 and mode age of 27. For LiveJournal Lions fans, 17 list their age. They have an average age of 26, and a median and mode age of 24. Only one other group, Queensland Maroons on bebo, have more than 10 fans who list their ages. In that group, 21 list their ages, with an average age of 21.9, median age of 20 and mode age of 20.
Bebo and blogger both allow users to publicly display their gender. The team and network with the highest percentage of male fans involves the Queensland Reds on bebo, where all six individuals list their gender as male. The next highest percentage of male in the community include the Brisbane Bulls on bebo and the Queensland Bulls on bebo. In both cases, the percentage of males is 60%. In the case of the Brisbane Bulls, 40% or 2 people do not list a gender. For the Queensland Bulls, 20% or one person lists identifies as female and the other did not list a gender. The highest percentage of female members is the Queensland Bulls on blogger with 50% but that community only has two members. The next highest percentage is for the Brisbane Broncos community on blogger at 42% or five people identifying as female. All other members of that community identify as male. The Brisbane Lions community on blogger has a female percentage at 38, with 6 people identifying as female. 56% of the members identify as male and 6%, or one person, do not list a gender. The highest percentage of unknown/unlisted gender is for the Queensland Sundevils bebo community, which only has one person and they don’t identify their gender. After that is the Brisbane Roar community on bebo, where 69% or 11 people do not identify their gender, 4 people identify as male and 1 identifies as female. The Brisbane Lions community on bebo has 40% unknown/unlisted with 53 people not including their gender. 36% of the Lions bebo community identifies as male and 24% identifies as female.
This isn’t the best write up, mostly just summarizing some of the data. The rest of the data used for this post will show up in future posts. As I learn more, I’m planning on integrating more analysis of what this data means.
