the nhl and you

i've been spending a lot of time looking around on flickr lately. thanks to trent's wonderful relaxed camera policy for this tour, people are taking some beautiful pictures. so anyhow, several times in the past few days, while looking through somebody's photostream (not a specific album), the pictures have abruptly gone from nine inch nails related to hockey related. on twitter and on the forums, i've seen several hockey icons. lots of penguins/detroit mentions. i haven't come across any soccer, basketball, baseball or football stuff. just lots of hockey.

why is this? i mean, i love it but i kind of don't get it. WHO are hockey fans? where do they come from? besides canada.

i've also heard quite a few times that hockey fans are the most affluent of all major team-sport fans. hmmm... so that made me curious to go look up hockey fan demographics.

i found one pretty good study from experian research that came out last november. it compared nhl, mls, mlb, nfl and nba.

hockey fans are the youngest, the richest, the most tech-savvy, most into gadgets and most likely to buy crap online (obviously this research was geared to advertisers).

the mean household income part went: nhl, mls, nba, mlb and then nfl. i guess that makes sense since the reverse order is the order of popularity, right? and nfl and mlb are pretty damn close. so i guess the more fans, the lower the mhhi since you're appealing to the widest variety of people.

what surprised me is that hockey fans are the youngest. why is that? this sport has been around forever and ever. there are lots of classic rivalries. but now that i think about it, there really aren't that many old people at the games. it's usually young, hip-looking people in leather jackets and frameless glasses. everyone looks mildly european. or they're in a jersey. but i always assumed that was because we were in la. but then, at a baseball game, there are craploads of old folks. hmmm...

nhl fans are 20% more likely than other fans to "try to keep up with latest technology"

11% more likely to own a digital camera, 10% more likely to own an mp3 player.

i dunno... there are tons of stats. i wonder if there is a musical preference demographic study. there are probably tons.

i don't really know why i posted this other than i thought it was interesting. oh, and that it helped me come to some kind of mean conclusions that i won't share here... but it's nice to save the stats as a reference, i guess.