Ozzie Sport

This post is basically an update of Version 2: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers. I haven’t actively sought to improve or update the accounts included on this list though there are a few new accounts.  A few accounts have been deleted and one has been suspended, LanceFranklin. Deleted and suspended accounts have been marked with a 0 for total number of followers.

This data was gathered on May 30, 2010.  It includes non-Australian teams that compete in Australian based leagues.  It also contains Australian some athlete accounts where the athlete competes for a club in an Australian based league.

Related Posts:

• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (October 11)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (October 4)
• Most popular Australian athletes, clubs, leagues and sport organizations on Twitter (version 2)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)

I’ve been data collecting again. In this case, I was updating my Facebook group and fan pages member totals. Eventually, this will all be written up and include an analysis of some patterns that exist. In the meantime, I feel the need to share of this data as the results… surprised me.  I was curious as to which Australian team had the most popular official Facebook page.  Bearing in mind that outside the AFL and NRL, my inclusion list is limited and that not every team has an official page… This list should not be considered all comprehensive.  Still, it gives a fairly good idea of what may be going on Facebook:

Related Posts:

• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

This isn’t much of a follow up. I was out walking after having read a few chapters in The Australian football business : a spectator’s guide to the VFL / Bob Stewart and I began wondering if there were some geographic pattens in who was condemning Jason Akermanis on Facebook, where condemning equals joining a group or liking a fan page that criticized his comment.

There were two real options to create comparisons: Get information from a few of the smaller groups with 10 or fewer members and declare them representative of each position or find a larger sample and get the network affiliation for all members of the larger group. I decided on the second. Jason Akermanis is a homophobe. is a Facebook group that has gained 281 members since May 20 for a total of 427 members. It appears to have been created directly in response to Jason’s comments and could be seen as condemning them. When scrolling through the membership list, I found 24 people who listed a network they belonged to. We’ll call this the dislike Jason group. As a control group of people who “like” Jason, I chose The Jason Akermanis Appreciation Society. It had 457 members on May 22, up only three from May 20. 24 people in this group also had a network listed. This group should be his fanbase. Their lack of quitting should not be read as supporting his comments: Non-action does not imply support. I’m mostly after the idea of are these two separate groups similar based on location. The following table was generated after tabulating how many people from each group listed specific networks:

The simple answer appears to be yes, there is a difference between the two. Fans of Jason appear to be more evenly distributed across various networks. Of the high schools and colleges I could easily identify, 3 were in the dislike Jason group and 7 were in the like Jason group. 18 university students joined the anti-group versus 13 in the like group. (These numbers are probably off. I’m not completely familiar with all the schools involved so some were not counted.) This suggests that university students were more likely to condemned the comments compared to high school students… or at least, university students were more willing to indicate their displeasure on a public profile. That is a bit interesting. It would be nice to have a Facebook data miner so I could see if larger patterns like this existed.

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
• Joel Monaghan’s Mad Monday and the Online Canberra Raiders Fan Base
• Which AFL team do Canberrans support in the Grand Final?

This is a quick data dump post.  I know who Jason Akermanis is because I saw him play this past weekend in Canberra.  I’ve been told he has a tendency to open his mouth and speak frankly in such a way that his previous club didn’t like him.  Thus, it was apparently not that surprising that he opened his mouth and offended people today.  I may or may not be interested in writing about him and the response to his comments at a later date.  It will come down to time and interest.  Still, benchmarks in case I do and data dumping now for those who might want to write an analysis that I’m not keen to write right now.

Google data

This data was retrieved between 6pm and 7pm on May 20, 2010 Canberra time.   It was retrieved using manual screen scraping.  (I visited each page and copy and pasted the number.)  I was not logged in to any account at the time to prevent my previous searches from influencing the numbers.  The API was not used.  The SE stands for search engine that was used to get the number.  (There are sometimes differences between .com and .com.au.) The Jason story is beginning to circulate but doesn’t appear to be widely picked up outside the metro areas so far. I added a by city component because I find geographic patterns interesting.

Facebook

Before I did Google, I looked at Facebook.  This was done between 5:30 and 6:00pm Canberra time on May 20, 2010.  The Jason situation had already hit Facebook as there was a Facebook group dedicated to being unhappy with Jason by that time.  I found these fan pages by searching for him.  I did not include people or groups in this sample.  None of these pages appear to be officially connected to either the AFL, the Western Bulldogs or Jason Akermanis.

I’m going to speculate that two of those are likely to see an increase in membership over the next couple of days.  How large an increase, I do not yet know and do not feel comfortable speculating about.

After that, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to benchmark the Facebook groups. These can be easy to create. When I looked, there turned out to be a number of them dedicated to Jason, some of which were created in response to the situation. As I have no previous benchmarks, I can’t tell when some of the larger groups were created. Still, this is where the groups about Jason stand now.

Related Posts:

• An NRL social media / web data pack
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups (November 23)
• More popular Australian (and Kiwi) sport related Facebook fanpages and groups
• Joel Monaghan’s Mad Monday and the Online Canberra Raiders Fan Base

I’m a little obsessed with foursquare data at the moment and I’m doing this a little early.  I’ll probably update this on Tuesday with a new post after the St. Kilda Monday night match.  At the moment though, based on the two completed games so far this week and last week, this post answers what team has the largest community of Foursquare users.  The surprise is how Collingwood hasn’t run away with this.

Related Posts:

• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular sport league/team websites in Australia
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 1)

Back on March 25, 2010, I collected data regarding the number of fans of the official AFL team Facebook fan pages.  It has been a while and I was curious as to which team had the most growth since the last time I looked.  Did any team do a really good job picking up fans?  Does that have any connection to how well the team did?  (There are a whole bunch of other potential factors.  I just haven’t looked at them.)  The team at the top of the ladder for Facebook fan growth is the Essendom Bombers.  The team at the bottom of the ladder is the Adelaide Crows.  Teams not included didn’t have official pages on March 25, 2010.

Is there a correlation between a team’s performance so far this season based on their ladder position and the number of new fans?  No, the correlation is -0.04002 where the Sydney Swans and Brisbane Lions get zero new fans as they do not have a fan page.   If those two teams are removed, -0.10666.  That still is completely random.  The cause for the big increase in fans is not dependent on team performance; other factors must explain the increase in fans.

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
• Most popular AFL and NRL teams on Facebook
• AFL on Facebook

What’s the most popular AFL team on Facebook?  That really does depend on how you measure it.

The following table has a column for total people listing a team as an interest, total number of members of the largest fan page dedicated to a team, total number of fans of the largest page dedicated to a team and the grand total.  This information was collected in the past three days.

And then I completed this and realized the biggest fan pages I had?  They weren’t the official ones.   Time to get the official ones, where the total fans are much bigger, and then update.

Green: Indicates official Facebook fanpage has the most fans.
Blue: Indicates a page not linked on the official page has the most fans.
Red: Indicates an official Facebook fanpage was not found to be linked to on the Club’s official site.
Black: AFL does not link to an official page for the team.

Fixed. As an American, I’m used to professional team names being City Mascot. When I search, this tends to be my default mode of searching. It can screw up results and I have to remember to search all variations to make sure this doesn’t happen. When I was just looking for biggest, I didn’t. Woe. But anyway, these results should hopefully be a bit more accurate. I went to every team’s official site that was linked on the AFL’s site. On the official site, I looked for their official Facebook fanpage accounts. Then I took that information and added it to the above table to get a more accurate picture. If an unofficial fanpage had more fans than the official one? I left the unofficial one. I’ve color coded that chart to make easy to see where I did that.

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
• Most popular AFL and NRL teams on Facebook
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)

Gaia Online is an anime, role playing themed social network aimed at an English speaking audience.  According to Alexa, the site is ranked the 2,988th most popular in Australia.  Given the target audience, I was curious as to how large the Australian based sports fandom was.  I went to the search page, selected interest and then searched every team on my list.

The list of teams on my list include: Collingwood Magpies, Carlton Blues, Queensland Maroons, Melbourne Victory, Brisbane Broncos, West Coast Eagles, Essendon Bombers, NSW Blues, Parramatta Eels, Adelaide Crows, Melbourne Storm , Wests Tigers, St. Kilda Saints, Sydney Swans, Fremantle Dockers, New South Wales Blues, Richmond Tigers, Sydney Roosters , Gold Coast Titans, Pretoria  Bulls (Northern Bulls), St. George Illawarra Dragons, Victorian Bushrangers, Cronulla-Sutherland Sharks, Johannesburg Lions, South Sydney Rabbitohs , Newcastle Knights , Brisbane Lions, Adelaide United, Manly-Warringah Sea Eagles, Geelong Cats, North Queensland Cowboys , Durban Sharks (Coastal Sharks)(Natal Sharks), New South Wales Waratahs, Sydney FC, Canberra Raiders, Penrith Panthers, North Melbourne Kangaroos, Melbourne Demons, Central Cheetahs (Vodacom Cheetahs), Western Australia Force (Western Force), New Zealand Warriors (Auckland Warriors), Wellington Hurricanes, Port Adelaide Power, Adelaide 36ers , Hawthorn Hawks, Central Coast Mariners Football Club, Brisbane Roar (Queensland Roar), Newcastle Jets, Perth Wildcats , Western Bulldogs, ACT Brumbies, Canterbury-Bankstown Bulldogs , St. George Dragons (defunct), Perth Glory, Melbourne Vixens , Australian Diamonds (national team), Canterbury Crusaders, Balmain Tigers (defunct), Gold Coast Football Club, North Sydney Bears (defunct), Barbagallo Perth Heat, Gold Coast United, South Australia Bite, Western Sydney Rollers, Wellington Phoenix, Illawarra Steelers (defunct), North Queensland Fury FC, Melbourne Tigers , Cape Town Stormers (Western Stormers)(Vodacom Stormers), Wollongong Hawks , Queensland Reds, Waikato Chiefs, South (Melbourne) Dragons, Australian Boomers, Tassie Tigers (Tasmanian Tigers), Townsville Crocodiles , Sydney Olympic , Cairns Taipans , Queensland Firebirds, Perth Blitz, South Australian Redbacks (Southern Redbacks), Western Suburbs Magpies (defunct), New South Wales Swifts (Sydney Swifts), Northern Eagles (defunct), Melbourne Rebels, WA Raiders, Box Hill Hawks , Casey Scorpions , North Ballarat Roosters , Auckland Blues, Sydney United , Australian Flames (national team), New Zealand Breakers , Queensland Bulls, Old Xaverians , Adelaide Thunderbirds , West Coast Fever, Sydney Kings , Mountains Kariong Cricket Club, East Bentleigh Cricket Club, Sydney Tigers , Penrith City Outlaws (UWS Outlaws), Gold Coast Blaze , Preshil Cricket Club, Western Warriors, Sydney Windies Cricket Club, Manly United , Otago Highlanders, Dandenong Jayco Rangers (Dandenong Rangers), Jinnah Cricket Club, Petersham RUFC Netball Club, ACE Netball Club, Orcas Netball, Australian Opals, Brisbane Bullets, Logan Thunder, Port Melbourne Borough , Fitzroy Lions, Newtown Jets (defunct), Alberton Cricket Club Inc., Australian Institute of Sport, Highett Cricket Club, Werribee Tigers , Gold Coast Seagulls (defunct), Canberra Capitals, Tuggeranong Hawks, Cumberland (defunct), Melbourne Phoenix , West Sydney Berries , Central Pulse , Gold Coast Chargers (defunct), Wollongong Wolves, Adelaide Lightning, Belconnen Magpies, Gold Coast Giants (defunct), Northern Bullants , Southern Steel , Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic, West Sydney Pirates, Adelaide Rams (defunct), Ainslie Football Club, Eastlake Football Club, New South Wales Waratahs, Perth Lynx, Queanbeyan Tigers, SA Fire, Sydney Uni Flames, Townsville Fire, UTS Gridiron, West Sydney Razorbacks , Western Reds (defunct), Bendigo Spirit, Fitzroy Reds, Newcastle Rebels (defunct), Northern Mystics , NT Stingers, Old Melburnians , Perth Orioles , Perth Reds (defunct), Queensland Sundevils, Tassie Tigers, Victoria Aces, Victorian Eagles, Victorian state team, Wollongong Mustangs, ACT Monarchs, Adelaide Thunder, AIS Canberra Darters , Annandale Dales (defunct), Bankstown City Lions , Bendigo Bombers , Blacktown City Demons , Bondi Raiders, Bonnyrigg White Eagles , Brisbane Spinning Bullets, Bulleen Boomers, Canberra Labor Club Lakers, Canterbury Tactix , Coburg Tigers , Collegians Football Club , Collingwood Magpies , De La Salle Old Collegians , Frankston Dolphins , Geelong Cats , Glebe Dirty Reds (defunct), Hunter Jaegers , Hunter Mariners (defunct), Marcellin Old Collegians , Marconi Stallions , Melbourne Kestrels , New South Wales Patriots , Northwestern Predators, NSW Wolfpack, Old Brighton Grammarians , Old Scotch , Old Trinity Grammarians , Perth Wheelcats, Queensland Blades, Queensland Rams, Rockdale City Suns , Sandringham Zebras , South Coast Wolves , South Queensland Crushers (defunct), Southern Hotshots, St Bedes/Mentone Tigers Football Club , Sutherland Seahawks, Sutherland Sharks , Sydney Swans Reserves, Sydney University Lions, University Blues , Victoria Vikings, WA Thundersticks, Wenty Leagues WheelKings, Williamstown Seagulls , and Wollongong Roller Hawks.

It is not a short list.  (At the same time, it isn’t all that comprehensive. It only includes about 215 teams of the over 3,000 various teams I know exist in the country.)  I found only seven teams had people eleven total who listed a team as an interest.  The teams included 4 from the NRL, and 1 from the AFL, A-League and Super 14.  Gaia Online is different in league representation that FaceBook, blogger, Twitter, LiveJournal and its clones, where the AFL dominates.

The teams represented on Gaiai Online include Brisbane Broncos (1), Parramatta Eels (1), Sydney Roosters  (3),  Sydney FC (2), Canberra Raiders (1), Western Bulldogs (1), and ACT Brumbies (1). The 11 team interests listing include 9 people using 10 accounts.

If the duplicates are taken out, the network is the youngest where age can easily be determined.   The average of all users on Gaia Online is 18.5.  This compares to 24 on bebo, 26 on LiveJournal and its clones, 28 on orkut, and 29 on blogger.

Three people list their city of residence.  Two of those are in New South Wales and one is the ACT.  This could explain the favoring of the NRL.   Everyone who lists a country of residence lists their location as Australia.  This is also unique when compared to other networks because except for the smaller LiveJournal clones, there is some one from another country who is a fan of an Australian based team.

Four people list their gender: Three female and one male.  This ratio is nearly inverse of what bebo and blogger are where 66% of bebo users listing an Australian team as an interest are male and 70% of blogger users are male.

Gaia Online’s unique audience has an impact on the type of Australian sports fans on it.  They are younger, more New South Wales based and much more female.

Related Posts:

• Version 3: Most popular Australian athlete and team related Twitter accounts by total followers.
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (November 16)

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 Freemantle Dockers community.The Fremantle Dockers directory on Yahoo!Groups has five mailing lists.  Of these, four are actually about the AFL team and one is generally dedicated to the AFL.  The four lists are docker_1995, fremantledockersinternetclub, Fremantle_Dockers, and grazzasfremantledockersclub. The first was created in February 2008 and as three members.  There has been no legitimate content posted to it.  The second two were both founded in 2000. fremantledockersinternetclub has 17 members and legitimate content appears to have ended after May 2006. Fremantle_Dockers has 66 members.  Legitimate content ended after January 2005. grazzasfremantledockersclub was founded in December 1999 and has 23 members.  Legitimate content ended after April 2002.

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

This community just is not as active as the Sydney Swans or Western Bulldogs.  The peak for the Bulldogs was at about 24 and the peak for the Swans was 49.  What is interesting is that the peaks differ, with a 2003 peak for the Dockers compared to a 2001 and 2008 peak for the Bulldogs and a 2005 and 2006 peak for the Swans. According to Wikipedia, 2003 was a great year for the Dockers as they finished 5th and made it to the finals.  While they finished 3rd and made it to the finals in 2006, there was no similar bump.  For this team, there have to be other factors at play to explain the overall low posting volume and the total posting drop off since late 2006.

Related Posts:

• Based on data to date: Biggest Australian sports fandom
• The AFL on Yahoo!Groups
• One week Twitter change for Australia/New Zealand sport related accounts
• Most popular Australian (and New Zealand) sport related Twitter accounts (December 11)