2017 BigSoccer NWSL "Attendance"

I'm guessing the same thing effecting actual attendance is affecting the PBP discussions here. I know for myself, for example, I'm usually busy Saturday afternoon. Which means I can't watch most of the 4 PM eastern games live.

(Also the site redesign probably hasn't helped, either)

 

Maybe ... more of us are watching live in situ

 

There was a crazy WPS fan that was posting back then.

 

Same for me. I'm not watching most games live, but I do go back and read the discussion threads, so I'm at least helping the view count, right?

I don't think its just the NWSL forum. I feel like we've lost some posters this year both here and in the US forums; I can't think of any posters specifically, but both forums feel slower than they used to be.

 

Since there aren't any cups, Olympics or even qualifiers right now, is that surprising?

 

Wonder if it can be the long wave of new social media slowly but steadily eroding posters from traditional forums. One could wonder: then why all of a sudden in 2017? One could answer: if it has to happen, it eventually will happen...

Not sure, though. For me, of course, a Tweet is a totally different thing compared to a well-thought and well-written post, uploaded on a perfectly ordered archive, but I wonder if there aren't many people around who are going for less complex (and more trivial) forms of communciation.

 

Also no expansion this year, and while there are some interesting and exciting new players, some star power has been lost.

Not seeing as much allegiance to specific teams on these boards any more, everything seems to fall under a few general discussion threads of a dozen or so posters exchanging information..

I add to the view counts, replies not so much. I don't have time to analyze but think the drop off would be even greater going back to WUSA or even WPS days when most teams had very active forums and there some decent rivalries and great trolling.

MagicJack alone probably beat these numbers.

 

I don't believe magicJack alone beat our numbers now in any way.

However, the WUSA/WPS comparison is worth mentioning in the sense that forums like BigSoccer here were THE way to connect with other fans during those years. Yes, Twitter (and YouTube and Facebook) existed during WPS, but NWSL essentially lives from Twitter and (until this year) YouTube, not to mention Facebook is even bigger now and we actually have Instagram, none of which were the case for WPS and certainly not the case for WUSA.

In the age of Social Media, forums in general have been dying all across the internet. That's just been a normal pattern.

 

Qualifiers don't move the needle much in the league forums. (I'm not sure what happened in 2014 but I know it wasn't qualifiers.) But I would that general attention from Cups/Olympics helped 15&16 while the perceived exodus of players has hurt 17.

 

Agree in general with your comments, and the magicJack comment was meant with some sarcasm, but in fact just that forum had 182 replies and 31,057 views from 4/15/2011 to 5/21/2011, not including more than a few threads in the WPS general forum.

 

Hmm... so it has less replies than 2017's weekly threads together but roughly 4x more views. Odd.

 

It's common for more to read than post.

 

Duh. That wasn't the point. The point was that the ratio of reads:replies had apparently changed drastically.

 

That's what I was talking about. And it makes me sad.

 

I am sorry for only thinking of external reasons, not having anything to do with NWSL, nor even with soccer, but couldn't it also be somehow tied to the new upgrade of this very website? The beginning of 2017 NWSL season near-perfectly overlapped with this new look of BigSoccer, that caused some adjustment-problems in the first weeks of the transition... Now, it's true that, by now, almost all of the functionalities of this forum went back to the previous standards and many upgrade-issues were fixed (not all of them, actually), but is it impossible that the whole of BigSoccer meanwhile lost some users who didn't want to change to the new version?

I know it sounds like a silly reason to leave a forum, if it's important for you, but: 1) it could be that for some people it wasn't so important, so a simple change of look was enough for them wanting to leave; 2) we probably have to admit that many of us who are faithful to this old form of social-media are quite conservative and don't like change (or at least don't like it so much): maybe some people simply refused to change. I guess a little loss of users is physiological during upgrades; but if the kind of media isn't enough attractive anymore to quickly find new users at their place, things end summing up...

 

Also, not sure how interesting the following data can be for US fans, but I'd like to show with them that what's happening is not specific to NWSL forums. On Nadeshiko Japan thread (a free-for-all monster including discussions about NTs, Nadeshiko League, clubs, overseas players and basically anything ) we experienced a similar decline since 2011 (the year of the WWC win, whose data can't be compared because back then the thread was separated in 3 parts).

REPLIES and VIEWS on Nadeshiko Japan thread:

Year	2012	2013	2014	2015	2016
replies	10.012	11.380	11.468	6760	5262
views	402.499	336.594	325.368	257.113	196.438

And, to complete the data, after 5 months into 2017, current Nadeshiko Japan thread has "just" 1.256 replies and 56.937 views.

Yes, you could say there were specific factors: interest for Nadeshiko Japan had a boom with 2011 WWC victory and 2012 Olympic silver medal, then slowly decreased; we lost some particular users along the way who were bumping the stats alone...

But, despite these specific remarks, it seems to me that the bottom line is that, in the last 2-3 years, all of BigSoccer (and probably all of the traditional forums) knew some form of decline...