NFL television ratings, here comes the science

Research from the University of Illinois.

The release, er, story:

Winning record, team longevity, prime-time games influence NFL TV ratings

8/4/10 | Phil Ciciora, News Editor

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi once said, “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” For NFL teams, especially small-market franchises seeking to increase their fan base, winning does help, but so does team longevity in the market as well as the number of games played in prime time, according to research by a University of Illinois sports economist.

Scott Tainsky, a professor of recreation, sport and tourism at Illinois, says that many of the same factors that influence whether fans attend a game in-person also influence a team’s television ratings.

“Sports economists have traditionally relied on attendance figures as a proxy for demand in order to figure out what’s motivating fans to go to games,” Tainsky said. “Even though the NFL is priced just a little bit below where it could maximize revenue at the gate, it still requires a large income or at least a large outlay of money for the average fan to see a game in-person.”

According to Tainsky, whose research was published in the Journal of Sports Economics, since the vast majority of fans watch the games on TV instead of in-person, and with the NFL generating over half of its revenue through TV contracts, TV ratings might actually function as a better proxy for consumer demand in both the home and road teams’ markets.

“We have a long history of studying consumer demand for major league baseball, but there’s very little research done on the NFL, even though it’s the largest revenue, most popular sport in the U.S.,” he said.

Of the three factors that positively influence demand, fielding a winning team is the most difficult variable to account for on a year-to-year basis, especially for small-market teams.

“From the first day of training camp, winning is the goal for every team in the league,” Tainsky said. “But that’s going to be somewhat cyclical, since the league has a pretty hard salary cap. If the spending on player talent is virtually equivalent for all 32 teams, there’s going to be parity, meaning that some teams will have good years while other teams will have bad years.”

Since it’s easier for the big-market teams such as Dallas and Chicago to weather the year-to-year swings in their win-loss records, small-market teams need to be even more proactive in courting fans when they’re muddling through a losing campaign.

One way to do that, Tainsky says, is to promote the experience of going to the game.

“When you’re a small-market team and you’re having a down year, you have to promote other things besides the quality of the team,” Tainsky said. “You have to market the tradition of sports being passed down from generation to generation, this notion of, ‘I went to the game with my dad, and he went with his dad,’ or the ‘On any given Sunday…’ mythology that the NFL likes to cultivate. If you can get this to be a habit of consumption on Sundays, that’s ideal, because it’s easier to take it on the chin when they’re not doing so well.”

Small-market teams mired in a rebuilding year are also at risk of having their broadcasts blacked out as a result of poor attendance. But Tainsky discovered that ratings for telecasts in those markets – Atlanta, Buffalo, Jacksonville, Oakland, St. Louis and Tennessee – were on par with the remaining 26 franchises. He blames market size rather than market demand for the teams’ failure to sell out games.

“There are three different ways that Nielsen collects ratings, and one of them is the percentage of TVs in the area that are on, and those aren’t appreciably lower in cities that experience blackouts,” Tainsky said. “In fact, the per capita demand is often higher in small markets; they just have trouble filling 60- and 70,000- seat stadiums. A place like New York City has a low market share, but the sheer number of people it has in its surrounding metropolitan area allows it to sell out games.”

In that respect, it may not be the fault of the smaller market cities that they can’t get a larger percentage of a viewing audience, Tainsky says.

“The team might be doing everything it can do to attract fans, but because of the smaller population size, it has to be that much more popular to avert blackouts.”

Although there was a slight ratings bump for games played in prime time, Tainsky said that sharing a home market with another team, as the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders do in the Bay Area, represented a significant drag on consumer demand. The socioeconomic status of fans was also negatively associated with ratings. Tainsky noted that other research has shown that lower-income fans engage in homebound and sedentary activities, further indicating that TV ratings might be a better measure of consumer demand.

Using TV ratings to analyze demand also allows sports economists to look at the size of viewership in cities that don’t have a home game that weekend, or in cities that don’t have teams. There’s also the “diaspora effect,” where fans have been displaced either by the team moving to a different market (the Baltimore Colts moving to Indianapolis, for example) or the fans themselves moving from their home markets (for example, displaced Pittsburghers living in suburban Chicago).

“Population flow from city-to-city does seem to have an effect on ratings for games,” Tainsky said. “If more people from western Pennsylvania have moved to the Chicago suburbs, the game featuring the Steelers will be popular but only if the game is being played at Heinz Field in Pittsburgh.”

Tainsky said displaced fans won’t watch in great numbers if the Steelers are playing on the road at, say, Jacksonville, which may indicate that viewers aren’t necessarily tuning in for the game itself, but rather for the feelings of nostalgia that watching a football game on a Sunday evokes.

“It makes them think back to where they’re from, and the good times they had watching those games in the past,” he said. “So there’s more to it than just the game itself.”

Hookers and social media

This blog hasn’t been shying away from the controversial the last couple of days, so why not a bit on prostitution and web 2.0 …

From the link:

“Over the past decade, the Internet has become an increasingly important vehicle for sharing information about prostitution,” say Luis Rocha at Umea University in Sweden and a couple of buddies. That makes it possible to study the network of links between buyers and sellers at a level of detail that has never been possible before. Today, Rocha and co reveal the results one such study of prostitute-related activity in Brazil.

The community they look at is a public online forum with free registration, financed by advertisements, in which men grade and categorise their sexual encounters with female escorts. The community appears large with over 10,000 buyers and more than 6000 sellers all of whom use anonymous nicknames. The study covers a period of 6 years from when the community was set up in 2002 until 2008.

Facebook, college kids and jealousy

Quite the combination …

The release:

Does Facebook usage contribute to jealousy in relationships?

New Rochelle, NY, August 6, 2009—The more time college students spend on Facebook, the more likely they are to feel jealous toward their romantic partners, leading to more time on Facebook searching for additional information that will further fuel their jealousy, in an escalating cycle that may become addictive, according to a study reported in CyberPsychology & Behavior, a peer-reviewed journal published by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com). The article is available free online at www.liebertpub.com/cpb

Amy Muise, MSc, Emily Christofides, MSc, and Serge Desmarais, PhD, from the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada), surveyed young adults involved in romantic relationships and found that those who spent time on social networking sites such as Facebook may be exposed to information about their partners that makes them jealous, leading them to spend more time involved in online surveillance and to uncover even more jealousy-provoking information.

The Rapid Communication, entitled “More Information than You Ever Wanted: Does Facebook Bring Out the Green-Eyed Monster of Jealousy?” describes a vicious cycle in which Facebook usage and feelings of jealousy become intertwined and have a negative influence on behavior and relationships. Some participants in the study described their increasing use of Facebook as “addictive.” The authors recommend further research to explore this feedback loop and to determine whether a similar relationship between online social networking and jealousy toward a partner affects older adults as well.

“This research on university age individuals is an excellent starting point to begin asking additional questions on how this new forum might be impacting the dynamics of adult relationships and other social processes,” says Professor Dr. Brenda K. Wiederhold, Editor-in-Chief of CyberPsychology & Behavior.

 

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CyberPsychology & Behavior is an authoritative peer-reviewed journal published bimonthly in print and online that explores the psychological and social issues surrounding the Internet and interactive technologies. A complete table of contents and free sample issue may be viewed online at www.liebertpub.com/cpb

Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. (www.liebertpub.com), is a privately held, fully integrated media company known for establishing authoritative peer-reviewed journals in many promising areas of science and biomedical research, including Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology and Alternative and Complementary Therapies. Its biotechnology trade magazine, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News (GEN), was the first in its field and is today the industry’s most widely read publication worldwide. A complete list of the firm’s 60 journals, books, and newsmagazines is available at www.liebertpub.com

Second Life contributes to social research

I’ve blogged on MMORPGs and social research here and here amonst other times, and I still find it fascinating — although not surprising — that university research is turning to virtual communities for social research. It’s real people interacting and simply by its nature everything collected is both data rich and pre-formatted for the most part. A researchers dream.

The latest release on virtual communities and social research (aside from dk: I spotted a typo in the release. Can you find it?):

Second Life data offers window into how trends spread

ANN ARBOR, Mich.—Do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors?

Social scientists don’t know for sure. They’re still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn’t keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.

But the virtual world Second Life does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have taken advantage of this unique information to study how “gestures” make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets that Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

Roughly half of the gestures the researchers studied made their way through the virtual world friend by friend.

“We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets,” said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Adamic is an author of a paper on the research that graduate student Eytan Bakshy will present on July 7 at the Association for Computer Machinery’s Conference on Electronic Conference in Stanford, Calif. Bakshy is a doctoral student in the School of Information.

“There’s been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds,” Adamic said. “We’re not saying this is exactly how people share in the real world, but we believe it does have some relevance.”

This study is one of the first to model social influence in a virtual world because of the rarity of having access to information about how information, assets or ideas propagate. In Second Life, the previous owner of a gesture is listed.

The researchers also found that the gestures that spread from friend to friend were not distributed as broadly as ones that were distributed outside of the social network, such as those acquired in stores or as give-aways.

And they discovered that the early adopters of gestures who are among the first 5-10 percent to acquire new assets are not the same as the influencers, who tend to distribute them most broadly. This aligns with what social scientists have found.

“In our study, we sought to develop a more rigorous understanding of social processes that underlies many cultural and economic phenomena,” Bakshy said. “While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence.”

The researchers examined 130 days worth of gesture transfers in late 2008 and early 2009. They looked at 100,229 users and 106,499 gestures. They obtained the data from Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life. Personally-identifying information had been removed.

 

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The paper is called, “Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content.” The research is funded by the National Science Foundation. Physics graduate student Brian Karrer is also a co-author.

For more information:

Full text of paper:
http://www-personal.umich.edu/~ladamic/

ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce:
http://www.sigecom.org/ec09/

Everquest and social research

My previous blog post was on using the internet for social research, and here is a study using Everquest II for just that on organizing networks in communities. Interesting work in the online social research area already.

The release from yesterday:

Surprising results: Virtual games players stick close to home

In the real world, tracking a person’s social network — which could include hundreds of contacts that serve different purposes — is nearly impossible.

But in online virtual games like EverQuest II, where tens of thousands of people leave digital traces as they chat with one another, perform quests together, form groups and buy and sell goods, researchers have found a gold mine of networking data.

That’s where social scientist and engineer Noshir Contractor comes in. Contractor, the Jane S. and William J. White Professor of Behavioral Sciences at the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science at Northwestern University, and his collaborators are studying nearly 60 terabytes of data from EverQuest II, a fantasy massive multiplayer online role-playing game where players complete quests and socialize with each other.

The researchers analyzed this data along with a survey of 7,000 players — making it one of the largest social science research projects ever performed, Contractor said.

Contractor will discuss their surprising results in a presentation titled “Social Drivers for Organizing Networks in Communities,” which will be part of the “Analyzing Virtual Worlds: Next Step in the Evolution of Social Science Research” symposium from 8:30 to 10 a.m. Saturday, Feb. 14, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Annual Meeting in Chicago. The symposium will be held in Columbus GH, Hyatt Regency Chicago, 151 East Wacker Drive.

The group has mined the data logs from the game to look for “structural signatures” that indicate different kinds of social network configurations.

“We can see whom these players talked to, whom they played with, and all the other interactions and transactions they had,” Contractor said. “In many ways it’s a microcosm of our existence in the general social world.”

The researchers found that many players underestimate the amount of time they spend playing the games, and the number of players who say they are depressed is disproportionately high. They also found that women don’t like to play with other women but are generally the most dedicated and satisfied players. And players aren’t just teenagers — in fact, the average age of a player is substantially higher.

But what most surprised Contractor was that even though players could play the game with anyone, anywhere, most people played with people in their general geographic area.

“People end up playing with people nearby, often with people they already know,” Contractor said. “It’s not creating new networks. It’s reinforcing existing networks. You can talk to anyone anywhere, and yet individuals 10 kilometers away from each other are five times more likely to be partners than those who are 100 kilometers away from each other.”

Worldwide, nearly 45 million people play massive multiplayer online role-playing games like EverQuest II, and the amount of real-world money associated with virtual worlds would make it the seventh largest country in the world according to gross domestic product.

“This is not a trivial issue,” Contractor said. “Now that we have the computing power to study these networks, we can explore different theories about social processes on a scale that was never possible before.”

 

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The internet and social research

I’ve blogged on this topic in the past, and I find the idea and practice of using the World Wide Web for research purposes very interesting. It seems there would be some significant hurdles in terms of scientific rigorousness, but it’s still pretty cool and very possibly a very powerful tool in the social research toolbox.

A release from yesterday:

Internet emerges as social research tool

Panel discusses use of the Web in social science study

		IMAGE: This is Thomas Dietz, Director, Environmental Science and Policy Program and Assistant Vice President for Environmental Research, Michigan State University. Click here for more information.

CHICAGO — For the past two decades, the Internet has been used by many as an easy-to-use tool that enables the spread of information globally. Increasingly, the Web is moving beyond its use as an electronic “Yellow Pages” and online messaging platform to a virtual world where social interaction and communities can inform social science and its applications in the real world.

“Although social scientists, engineers and physical scientists have studied the World Wide Web as an entity in and of itself for some time, there is now a growing group of social scientists who are learning how to use the World Wide Web as a tool for research rather than as a subject of research,” said Thomas Dietz, Michigan State University researcher and director of the university’s Environmental Science and Policy Program.

Today, at the American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting in Chicago, a panel of scientists organized by Dietz planned to examine various aspects of using the World Wide Web as a tool for research.

University of Michigan political science professor Arthur Lupia was to kick off the session by discussing how new virtual communities are improving surveys and transforming social science.

“Lupia is one of the world’s leaders related to survey research on the Web,” Dietz said. “His focus is on learning to use the Web as a way of soliciting people’s opinions and getting factual information from them via online surveys.”

Adam Henry, a doctoral fellow in the Sustainability Science Program at Harvard University’s Center for International Development, was scheduled next to discuss measuring social networks using the World Wide Web.

“Henry is developing very innovative ways to identify networks that are actual face-to-face relationships by tracking evidence streams on the Web,” Dietz said. “In other words, it’s not simply about who’s connected to whom on Facebook or Twitter, but who’s doing research with whom in the real world. It’s using the virtual world to identify things that are going on in the real world rather than using the virtual world simply to look at the virtual world.”

William Bainbridge, program director for the National Science Foundation’s Human-Centered Computing Cluster, was to rounded out the presentation with a discussion on the role of social science in creating virtual worlds.

“Bainbridge is studying group formation and social change over time in virtual worlds such as ‘World of Warcraft’ and ‘Second Life’ to inform and build on what sociologists have studied for 150 years,”

Dietz said. “He contends that virtual worlds are excellent laboratories for observing and prototyping new social forms that can later be applied to the outside world.”

Following the presentations, National Science Foundation sociology director Patricia White was to discuss implications of this research related to the future of social science.

 

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— by Val Osowski

Michigan State University has been advancing knowledge and transforming lives through innovative teaching, research and outreach for more than 150 years. MSU is known internationally as a major public university with global reach and extraordinary impact. Its 17 degree-granting colleges attract scholars worldwide who are interested in combining education with practical problem solving.

For MSU news on the Web, go to news.msu.edu.