Ozzie Sport

blogger is a popular blog hosting site. Many popular Australian and sports blogs use it. In the United States, the site also has high press visibility because of its inclusion in Google’s blog search and the number or journalists using Google Alerts, which pulls its notifications from Google’s blog search. The reliance on blogspot has been decreasing as people have eased away from blogging or switched to Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. The Australian sport population is smaller than that of Bebo but larger than that of 43 Things. For example, Collingwood had 68 fans on bebo and 7 people with Collingwood related goals on 43 Things. Blogger has 22.

Beyond the press reliance on using blogger as a source, another thing that makes a blogger audience desirable is that the format encourages people to write more. That additional content should encourage people to be more thoughtful and create dialogs around the team that they are blogging about. Theoretically, the longer and more prolonged the engagement that fans have regarding their team, the more likely they are to reaffirm their relationship with the team.

Sadly, the size of the Australian and Kiwi women’s sport community on blogger is non-existent when compared to their male counterparts. The lone fan of the Matildas is a male from South Australia.

Related Posts:

• 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)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)

Bebo is a social networking site that is popular in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom. The site’s traffic has been down in the past year or so. It traditionally has has a fairly large contingent of Australian sport fans, with most people being fans of the NRL. It has a smaller population of fans for other sports like the AFL and NBL. There were questions regarding bebo’s viability for most of 2010, when there were rumors that the site would be shut down if it failed to find a buyer. This and a variety of other factors, such as the popularity of Facebook and YouTube, have led to a lot of once active users becoming inactive.
Despite the issues regarding inactivity, it is a site worth looking at to begin to give a snapshot of sorts back in time, to understand the size of Australian and Kiwi women’s sport fandom four years ago to a year ago, when activity levels dropped off. It might be possible to determine where these fans migrated to by looking at growth on other niche networks, which could be useful for determining engagement strategies. This data can also give an idea as to what was popular. If the comparative levels of interest on other networks are not similar, it could suggest that clubs have failed with their marketing strategies or have found a method to really engage in their audience that other clubs could benefit from.

When looking at bebo, there are a variety of ways to do that. One of the first is to use search result totals, and compare the size of the community to other teams and over time. The second way is to look at the size groups/views for videos. The third way is to look at the demographic data for people who lit the team as an interest. This will be broken down by league/federation.

Search: ANZ Championship
The ANZ Championship is the most successful women’s (semi) professional league in Australia.  It makes sense that the team would have the largest amount of interest on bebo.  While this is true,  the community size, the number of groups and videos created by these fans is still extremely limited.  (Their counterparts in the AFL often have 200 to 400 people who list them as an interest.)

Search: AWIHL
This is a niche league, where the men’s team also fail to have people who list them as an interest. If there is an ice hockey fan base in Australia, it is not on bebo.

W-League
Somewhat surprisingly, the W-League fanbase on bebo appears to be a bit larger than that of the ANZ Championship. One possible factor for this could be that the overall fan community for soccer is really large on bebo. Another contributing factor could be that the Canberra United attract male fans to the sport that a W-League team may not otherwise get because the United do not have to compete with an A-League club in their city: If you love soccer in Canberra, you support the top level competitions here. Bebo also has a community of people who uploaded videos. Soccer videos are really popular across the whole of the network. Given that, W-League fans may be part of a larger part of video uploading culture that ANZ Championship fans are removed from.

One issue at play with W-League results is that Canberra United content is easier to pull out than the Melbourne Victory, because secondary keywords are needed to differentiate Melbourne Victory W-League results from A-League results. This means that real numbers for the W-League teams could be understated. Similar issues of a sort exist for the W-League, which shares a name with an American women’s soccer competition. This could lead to an over representation when just that term is counted.

WNBL
The WNBL is the premiere women’s basketball competition in Australia. Unlike the NBL, it does not include a New Zealand team. The problem with one of the teams looked at, the West Coast Waves, is that the name is a rather common phrase and almost none of the video results look relevant to the WNBL team. This type of issue can be a huge problem for women’s (and men) sport when doing promotion and reputation management for the club’s brand beyond the players.

WNCL

The WNCL teams being looked at do not share the name issues that their WNBL counterparts share. Unfortunately, they may suffer a problem with not all results being shown as they often have names with sponsors in them. Official and player content may pull up sponsor named related names. The average fan is less likely to use them as fannish identities are not based around who sponsors them.

Search: Women’s World Cup Soccer
The Matildas are Australia’s national women soccer team. As the W-League is larger than the ANZ Championship, it is not surprising that there is a comparable elevated amount of interest in the team.

Videos: W-League
Only the W-League Canberra United team were checked. Some of the videos for the team had quite a number of views. bebo’s stagnation is quite clear when looking at this data as the number of views for all videos failed to increase between June 3 and November 26.

People: ANZ Championship
The table below includes the demographic data for people who listed ANZ Championship teams as interests on bebo. This data tends to confirm that teams have local interest and don’t have national fan bases.

People: Basketball Australia
The Australian Opals have a similar issue with a few other Australian sport teams: People could use these words but not mean the team. This makes a bit of sense, given that one of the people who list the Opals as an interest is not from Australia.

People: W-League
Some what surprisingly, the people who list a location are not from Canberra. A possible explanation for this is that Sydney bebo users are friends or family of players, who themselves may not be from Canberra.

People: WNBL
Like the ANZ Championship, most fans are from areas near where the team is based. Fans also tend to be young and there is an even mix of male and female fans, which suggests that the WNBL could grow by working to attract that male audience in communities under served by NBL teams.

Related Posts:

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

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:

• 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)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)

This post is an updated version of my November 21 post. It contains more groups and fan pages. It should be a bit more comprehensive. Worth noting: When some of these groups were last checked, there were several members. Some of the things not appearing have been deleted including anti-Monaghan groups and anti-Akermanis groups. Others need to be checked. We’re still working on improving the program that fetches this data. Also, unlike Twitter, I’m a little more keen to get unofficial groups/fan pages (and those are easier for fans to create). This can help give an idea as to how controversies in fandom play out over time.

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Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)

I’m hoping that I can finally begin to get an accurate idea as to the size of the Australian (and Kiwi) sport community on Facebook based on membership in groups and liking of fan pages. I can’t necessarily get good demographic data out of this because of how Facebook works. (Twitter is better in that regards.) Still, if news stories like Akermanis, Monaghan and the Storm break again, I should have total membership that is more recent. woot woot.

That said, the following is data that I’ve manually data mined so far today. Hopefully some people will find it useful in terms of conceptualizing the size of the Australian (and Kiwi) sport community on Facebook. Yeah, a lot of this is random.

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 24)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 18)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)