When we are so focused on something, we might tend to think everyone is fascinated by “it” too. When your 6 year old kicks a goal in Soccer, we might wonder, at least for two or three seconds, why such a momentous event is not on CNN.…? So since I am so excited by things like the Vendee Globe, I have to remind myself that the audience for this, world wide, is pretty small. This got me going on the subject of just how big is the Vendee Globe, outside of France anyway. As is normal for the race over a million souls passed through the village in the week before the start last Saturday.
One convenient way to measure how popular something is these days might be the number of Friends on Face Book. This dawned on me when I noticed the race had the ubiquitous Like button on the race’s home page.
At the time, Sunday afternoon, the race had on the order of 33,000 likes. (As of Wednesday afternoon 14 November at 1600 EST, the VG was up to 50,000 & at 1825 that number was up to almost 52,000 Likes).
I wondered how that compared with other sailing events, so I spent some time digging around in Face Book and I offer the following results of my research. The big numbers are in round figures.
The Big Names
America’s Cup: 120,000
Oracle Team USA: 63,000
Emirates Team New Zealand-AC: 11,500
Artemis Racing-AC: 7,500
Volvo Ocean Race: 211,000-(Puma Ocean Racing, 27,000)
Barcelona World Race: 5,266
Mini Transat (the 650 class) 2,421
Global Ocean Race: 1,000
And for the “lesser” or Normal races:
Cruising Yacht Club of Australia The Hobart Race organizers: 428
RORC: -The rating office-512
Sydney-Hobart Race: 1224
Bermuda Race: (2012) 872
Trans-Pac Race: 2,365
So then I looked to see what the level of interest in the sailors themselves was.
Alex Thompson Racing: 34,500
Ben Ainslie: his fan page-32,000
Ainslie, the athlete: 4,000
Mike Golding Yacht Racing 4,000
Loick Peyron: 5,400–His brother, Bruno, has a FB page but no Likes.
Coutts: 4,950
Cayard: 3,769
Francois Gabart-29 year old new Wunderkind presently leading the Vendee Globe: 1250
Dennis Connors, actually his shop in San Diego: 986
Samantha Davies: 838-Sole woman in the current VG, from GBR
Paul Elvstrom: 552.
Ken Read: Could not find any page for Ken. (I guess it’s hard to keep up circling the world at 25 knots…)
Sailmakers:
Quantum Sails: 2,700
Quantum Racing: 5,600
North Sails: 36,000
Doyle Sailmakers: 1,800
Ullman Sails: Could not find any page for them
UK Sailmakers: 603
Sailing websites forums and news:
Sailing Anarchy: 26,000
Scuttlebutt: 5,700
Cruising World: 8,800
Sailing world: 8,800-Since they are owned by the same company maybe this is 8800 together….
Sail Magazine: 6,900
Latitude 38: 4,200
Wind check: 800
Wooden Boat 5,500
Compared to:
NASCAR: 3 million
NBA-Basketball: 14.8 Million
NFL-American Foot ball: 6.4 million
FIFA world cup Football 2014: 22,000
Formula One Car racing-On their website there is no Face Book link and yes that seems odd to me too, but there you are.
And compared to Politics:
Pres. Obama: 33 Million
Mitt Romney: 12 million, May be this ratio tells a story too…
What does it all mean? Not sure, but I do find it interesting. When I figure it I’ll post here…
Cheers
Coop