China’s tennis growth is impressive – but stats are still wrong

Li Na is China’s most famous tennis player

The growth in women’s tennis has been one of the great Chinese stories – in sport or elsewhere – in recent years. Li Na was the obvious catalyst, and in particular her 2011 French Open win, but much of the credit has to go to the WTA’s CEO, Stacey Allaster. This excellent profile by a former colleague of mine tells you everything you need to know about Allaster, who got the top job in women’s tennis in 2009.

China will have five WTA tournaments from next year – Shenzhen, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Beijing and Hong Kong – with another three lower-level tournaments, and Asian tennis got a huge boost with the news that the season-ending WTA Championships will move from Istanbul to Singapore from 2014 in a five-year deal.

Allaster spoke to the BBC this week in an awkwardly edited interview featuring question lobs such as:

“Has the success of China’s Li Na, who won the French Open Championships, helped in the popularity of tennis in Asia?”

Er, yes.

Allaster spoke about how broadcast coverage is up 100% in Asia, while viewership is up 60% – both phenomenal stats – but then came this:

“The one stat that continues to blow me away is social media. Globally the WTA has 70 million fans following women’s tennis. 40% come from China.”

Regular readers will know by now that my patented Questionable China Numbers alarm immediately started to ring, so I decided to look into the numbers. Here are the women’s Top 10 players and their Twitter followings:

Serena Williams – 4,407,751
Victoria Azarenka – 380,455
Li Na – n/a
Maria Sharapova – 706,962
Agnieszka Radwanska – 53,873
Petra Kvitova – 76,567
Sara Errani – 43,576
Jelena Jankovic – 74,131
Angelique Kerber – 61,833
Caroline Wozniacki – 569,387

Selected others:

Venus Williams – 1,051,214
Sloane Stephens – 78,821
WTA – 165,308

Those 12 accounts total 7,669,878. After the top players, there is a pretty significant drop-off, but let’s ascribe a total of 10 million to fans of women’s tennis on Twitter. Next here’s Facebook:

Serena Williams – 1,718,661
Victoria Azarenka – 611,260
Li Na – 114,119
Maria Sharapova – 11,170,222
Agnieszka Radwanska – 317,464
Petra Kvitova – 198,786
Sara Errani – 76,161
Jelena Jankovic – 214,183
Angelique Kerber – 109,325
Caroline Wozniacki – 707,310

Selected others:

Venus Williams – 1,366,402
Ana Ivanovic – 1,307,566
WTA – 1,147,299

Those 13 pages total 19,058,758 likes, with Sharapova accounting for more than half. Ditto comments from above about a drop-off after the top players, but Facebook followings on average are larger, so let’s ascribe a total of 25 million to fans of women’s tennis on Facebook. Next here’s Sina Weibo:

Serena Williams – 62,534
Victoria Azarenka – 759,619
Li Na – 22,206,191
Maria Sharapova – 1,652,302
Agnieszka Radwanska – 100,932
Petra Kvitova – 548,077
Sara Errani – n/a
Jelena Jankovic – n/a
Angelique Kerber – n/a
Caroline Wozniacki – 723,987

Selected others:

Peng Shuai – 437,549
Zheng Jie – 1,100,553
Yan Zi – 742,029
Ana Ivanovic – 110,675
WTA – 137,210

Those 12 accounts total 28,581,658. There is an even greater drop-off after the top players on Sina Weibo, since not too many other players even have an account, so let’s ascribe a total of 30 million to fans of women’s tennis on Sina Weibo.

That brings us up to a total of 65 million, out of the 70 million Allaster mentioned. It seems most likely that the remaining 5 million can be ascribed to Instagram, Tumblr, other sites and rounding errors, but the numbers are pretty much there.

Two problems are clear:

If you follow, say, Agnieszka Radwanska on Twitter, then there’s a pretty good chance you might also follow any or all of Serena, Azarenka, Sharapova, Wozniacki and others. And there’s a pretty good chance you’ve also liked some or all of that list on Facebook. Which means, of course, that the number of total fans on social media is likely massively inflated, due to individual fans following multiple players.
Secondly, we come to the China problem. As I have said many, many times, Sina Weibo numbers are not at all what they seem. The rule of thumb is to divide by ten to get a much closer estimate, but you also have the first problem that a Peng Shuai fan, for example, is likely also a fan of Li Na, Zheng Jie etc.

My divide-by-ten rule is not just something I’ve pulled out of thin air, but is taken directly from Sina itself. From a registered user base of 600 million, Sina said this month on its quarterly earnings call that daily active users are up to 60.2 million – a tenth of that registered user base – and a study by researchers at Hong Kong University earlier this year found that of those supposedly active users, a significant chunk were simply ‘lurking’, or reading, but not posting or re-posting. They found 57% of all accounts were completely blank (‘zombie’ accounts) and only 13% of the remaining 43% posted one or more messages per week.

All of which means that the 30 millions fans on Sina Weibo – and Li Na’s 22 million – are in reality nothing like. Yes, that still leaves millions of tennis fans in China, whose number is still growing, but it’s far more useful to look at numbers such as:

number of players
tournament revenue
TV numbers (though take these, too, with a sack load of salt)

If you’re still with me – and apologies for the long post – there’s an obvious reason why executives from all sports like to inflate their stats (or, at the very least, pass off clearly inflated third-party stats as gospel): attracting more cash from more sponsors. I would like nothing more than to see the continued growth of tennis in China, but let’s have an element of realism here, otherwise it could all come crashing down when the sponsors realize they’re paying a mark-up for nothing but hype.