Tl;dr: maybe you’ll look at this graphic and think “ah, hmm.” If you quit there and move on, you’re probably making the right call.
*This is not a very interesting post—and you’re probably lying to yourself if you think you’re interested in analyzing the demographic trends of a sports team subreddit—so proceed at your own risk of boredom:*
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I conducted a poll of current r/MkeBucks subscribers in early 2021. Since then, there has been a separate, rolling/ongoing. poll, with the same questions as the 2021 poll, but for new subscribers to r/MkeBucks.
I never really went back and did anything with it until now when I remembered them and was thinking I should share some of the results since they’re community polls—and typically people fill those out with the assumption that some day they’ll see some sort of outcome from the effort they put in to filling out the poll. So, this is me resolving that outstanding debt to posterity, haha.
There are flaws in this data, to be sure—and in some of the ways I compared the polls to theorize conclusions, so please don’t take this as any more than a thought experiment that at best, maybe a very small number of people find interesting. (Note—to avoid any confusion—I’m not a mod here anymore, just posting this informally as a member of the community.)
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##Wisconsin-Greco allegiances shift + schadenfreude📈? — [A.]
In 2021, it was generally rare, outside of postgame thread trolls and tell-you-how-I-come (peacefully) posts to see fans of other teams here, with the overwhelming majority of subscribers being Bucks fans—and primarily Bucks fans. Among new subscribers, only a bit more than two thirds of them are Bucks fans first and foremost, with the Giannis-over-team faction nearing 20%.
On top of that, more than 1 in 10 new subscribers have been non-Bucks fans in recent years (at least some chunk of those being Heat and other watch-it-burn influx subscribers held over from postseason losses in recent years, I’m guessing).
I’m sure many who have been around a while have noticed the shifts in discourse and discord that have accompanied these trends, haha.
##The eye test vs. box scores and hot takes — [B.]
The whole thing we do here is talk about a team that plays basketball, so actually seeing the team play basketball games had been a bedrock of shared perspective for a long time, but that foundation could be shifting. Among 2021 subscribers (all totals for regular-season games only), **more than half** of the subscribers watched **more than half of the Bucks’ games.**
Among new subscribers, 19% watch 5 Bucks games or fewer and 32.4% watch 20 Bucks games or fewer—combined, it means **more than half** of new subscribers watch** fewer than one quarter of the Bucks’ games.
This is kind of junk math, but averaging out the poll options with the percentages of answers for each, 2021 subscribers averaged ~45 Bucks games watched, compared to ~29 Bucks games watched by new subscribers.
Due to the nature of these polls, I think it could also be reasonable to think new subscribers’ games-watched totals are likely to trend up from when they took the poll, so this data might be misleading here.
That same flaw is also relevant to the next section…
##Tourism is booming? — [C.]
…as it makes sense that new subscribers will be made up of a considerable amount of people who are newly Bucks fans, so a poll of new subscribers is going to skew heavily toward a less-seasoned portion of the fanbase.
I don’t think there’s a lot to note here except for the 7% percent of new subscribers who aren’t Bucks fans. More Schadenfreude? Maybe just as likely: Giannis is a huge draw and we’ve been contenders for a while—more general NBA junkies or people from r/all, etc. are more likely to wind up subscribing than in the dark days.
##Okay boomer…? — [D.]
Somewhat surprisingly, there are both more older and more younger people subscribing to r/MkeBucks than were represented in the 2021 age distribution of total subscribers.
[*I was also surprised to realize I’m about to age into a new age demographic group, so that was a fun little existential crisis.*]
The age groups between the older and younger groups bookending them still combine to be a majority of new subscribers, but the fact that that majority is shrinking due to growth from opposite directions, to me, could point toward a loss of some fans who became fans/bandwagoned the year we won the championship, but bailed after one or more of our disappointing playoff exits recently—when the fun of a bandwagon slowed down for some stretches.
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Anyway, nothing too riveting here, but let me know if anyone has any questions or theories of your own (that is, if anyone makes it this far without falling asleep).
There are more poll questions from this that I have the data for as well that I can share at some point (including location distributions, fandom across years and parsley), but thought I’d start with this. I doubt this will be interesting to almost anyone, but I’m happy to have it off my back-burner.
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**Go Bucks.**
by GreekAlphabetSoup
