Ozzie Sport

Like the Adelaide 36ers, there is one group on Yahoo!Groups dedicated to the Brisbane Bullets: BrisbaneBullets.  It was created on March 2, 2007 and has three members. It can be found in the Australia category. Unlike the 36ers list, this group has some posting, the first of which was made on November 4, 2008.  Sadly, all this activity is spam related from two people.  It looks like the founder never posted.

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I’ve not been updating here much of late because of some real life issues.  Fun fun. If anyone wants a copy of the data I have so far, please let me know.

That said, I searched for the Adelaide 36ers on Yahoo!Groups.  There is one list dedicated to the team: 36ers. It was created on March 19, 2003.  It has one member and there have never been any posts to the list.  The list appears in the general basketball category.

Even with one member, the community size on Yahoo!Groups is bigger than that of the LiveJournal clones.

It will be interesting to see how the size of the community here compares to the other NBL teams.

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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.

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This post continues to look at the historical activity level of AFL fans on Yahoo!Groups.  This time, the focus is on the North Melbourne Kangaroos.

If you look at the North Melbourne Kangaroos category on Yahoo!Groups, you will find ten groups.  Of these, six of these are actually dedicated to the team.  They are northmelbournekangaroos, themightyrooboys, nmfc, mightyrooboys, northkangaroosclub and thenorthmelbournefc.  With the exception of themightyrooboys which was created in 1999, all the lists were created in 2000.  The average total membership membership is 24.  The lists all have open membership and have an ongoing spam problem.

I looked at the lists to determine when these lists had legitimate posting, added up the monthly totals across all six lists and generated the following chart:

The community was at its most active when it started.  There were two small season drops during the off season with the community all but disappearing after the 2002 campaign.  This some what resembles the pattern for the Essendon Bombers, though that community had more overall activity and a more extreme drop off in posting.  It looks like this particular service was never embraced by fans of the team as one of their early means of communicating.

In order to find out legitimate posting periods for nmfc, I had to join the list.  The list has 35 members at the moment. On topic posts to the list ended in January 2002.  Spam posting started in August 2004.  I decided to get membership demographics for the list since membership gave me access to a member list.  Of the 35 members, only one listed their age or gender (57, female) and no one listed their location.  (She joined during a period of legitimate posting.) Of the 35 members, thirteen or 37% joined during the period of legitimate posting.  Four members or 11% joined in the period where there was no posting.  Eighteen members or 51% joined during the period of only spam posting.  That’s a big problem for any sort of attempts to revive the list.  It is also a big problem for Yahoo!Groups and could explain why people who love mailing lists eschew their service.  It also makes it hard to legitimately get demographic data off the service, unless the assumption is made that all people joining after the period of spam content are actually spammers and their demographic data can be ignored.

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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.

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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 Richmond Tigers community. The Richmond Tigers directory on Yahoo!Groups has fifteen mailing lists.  Of these, ten are actually about the Richmond Tigers.  The lists are tiger_fury, sydrfc, tiger-talk, rfceyeofthetiger, RFC_Tigers, RFC-Tigers, rfctigerlovers, go_tigs87, feralrfc, and richmondtigers.   Of these, one has no posts (rfctigerlovers), one has one post (tiger_fury), four have ten or fewer posts (rfceyeofthetiger, RFC_Tigers,go_tigs87, richmondtigers), one has 20 posts (sydrfc), one has 4,874 posts (RFC-Tigers) and one has 92,687 (tiger-talk) as of the end of 2009.  If tiger-talk is not included, the average total membership to these groups is 22.  tiger-talk has 477 members and allows anyone to join but new members are moderated.  This keeps out the worst of the spam.  The half of the lists were created in 2003.  Two were created in 1999 and 2000.  One list was created in 2005.  Unlike the Swans, Bombers, Dockers and Bulldogs, this particular Yahoo!Groups population had some very active lists where the total volume on the list surpassed the total activity for all other groups.  Adding the legitimate posting volume together across all lists, the following chart was created:

To be honest, the posting patterns here are closer to what I expected to find for most teams: Big spikes during the season with and overall decline in activity as the population shifted away from Yahoo!Groups to other services.  That the minimal activity for other teams appeared to coincide with a team’s overall performance was rather surprising.

If I get the chance/have the time to go through and add data for team specific mailing lists not in the right subcategory, I may have to revisit some of the data I already posted to see if things change and more patterns like this one emerge.

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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.

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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.

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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 posts looks at the Western Bulldogs. The Western Bulldogs directory on Yahoo!Groups have ten mailing lists.  Of these, two are actually about the AFL team.  They are westernbulldogsfootballclub and westernbulldogskennel.  The first has 56 members, closed membership, an active moderator and is active.  The second has ten members, open membership and has only had one message posted since its founding.  Both lists were founded in 2000.

I took the monthly total posting volumes from both lists, added them together and created the following chart:

There were two major monthly peaks.  One took place in November 2008 with 24 posts.  The second major peak was in March 2001 with 16 posts.  The November peak occurred a few months after the team finished the season as a preliminary finalist.  The March 2001 peak was at the beginning of a season, after a season where the team had been an elimination finalist.  In between these two peaks, with the exception of 2006, the team performed rather poorly.  Performance here may be indicative of interest in discussing the team.  Another possible cause for these patterns involves the administrator of the mailing list.  As the admin needs to approve new members, it might be possible that from 2003 to 2007 the admin was not active in approving new members.  There just isn’t enough data here to have a definitive conclusion.

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As mentioned in my previous post, Yahoo!Groups has a spam problem.  Open membership groups get a lot of spammers joining.  Capatchas do not seem to stop spammers from joining.  Absentee owners, often from groups founded five to ten years ago, mean that these spammers are free to spam with out any consequences.   Public archives are a great incentive for spammers to do this as others archive those posts and provide additional links for them.  Yahoo!Groups is thus a bit more problematic, demographic information wise, than blogger (where spammers don’t fill in that info), bebo, LiveJournal and Facebook.  It just doesn’t feel worthwhile to make the effort to get it.

That said, I still want to look at Yahoo!Groups and their history in Australia’s sports fandom.  The first team I am looking at is the Sydney Swans.  There are fourteen groups listed in Yahoo!Groups Sydney Swans category.  Of these, six are actually dedicated to the Sydney Swans.  These are rainbow_swans, sydneyswansfc, redandwhiteonline, sydneyswanscentral, judeboltonandthesydneyswans, and swanniesfansunited.

All the Sydney Swans mailing lists were created in a window between October 1998 and October 2003, with one created in both those months and the other four created in 2001.  (In 2000, Yahoo!Groups acquired egroups and by 2001, they had migrated those mailing lists over.  In 2001, Yahoo!Groups had also lifted the ban on adult mailing lists.  Neither of these events likely explains the 2001 surge in group creation.  Other factors such as general internet connectivity and ease of creation of mailing lists on Yahoo!Groups compared to other tools like majordomo probably do a much better job at explaining this surge.)

All of these mailing lists  are currently pretty dead, with the exception of occasional spam posting.   I looked at each list to determine when spam content started and legitimate posting ended.  The total posting volume for these lists was then gathered and the following chart was created:

Mailing list volume in 2009 was a result of activity that was taking place on rainbow_swans, a mailing list for GLBT fans of the team.  Volume across all lists peaked in September 2005, the month that the team won their last Grand Final.  This activity all took place on rainbow_swans.  The month after their victory, volume dropped from 49 to 10 but there was activity on three lists.  The second major peak was in August 2006.  This was a month before the team appeared in the Grand Final, which they lost.  The volume was ten less than the previous year and, again, all took place on one list.  September, when they actually played in the finals, volume was significantly less at 26 total posts.

Overall, activity levels for the team’s fans on Yahoo!Groups tends to correlate with the team’s overall performance and when they are playing games during the season.

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