Given this week is the last full week of spring before summer, it would make sense that the sport most people would be reading about and watching videos of online would be cricket, golf or the like.
But in a sure sign that the footy season never ends, it will almost certainly be the AFL website that tops the online sporting charts – even if the poor performance of the Australian Test cricket team probably means fans are looking for any alternative to the country's No.1 summer sport.
The reason is the AFL draft, to be held on Friday at Sydney's Hordern Pavilion, and its popularity and timing, and that of other other post-AFL season events, is the result of the league's canny and deliberate strategy of staying in the news seemingly all the time.
It used to be as soon as the grand final was played on the last Saturday of September, sports fans would forget about football until the following Autumn. Now there is a two-week trade period in October, this week's draft, pre-season training before and after Christmas and then from next February a new women's AFL league.
The AFL's online numbers clearly show just how interested people are in all of those "out of season" events and show how canny the league's now chief executive Gillon McLachlan was to create and then champion the AFL Media division back in 2011 with an initial $5 million investment.
The two-week official trade period in October – the only time when players can move between clubs – and the week leading up to it after grand final day saw the main AFL website average 3.45 million unique visitors. That was up 12 per cent from the corresponding period in 2015.
The AFL established a special Trade Hub on its website for the period and also ran a live digital AFL Trade Radio show provided by private company Crocmedia. Cumulative visitor sessions for the three weeks reached 27.5 million, up 20 per cent on 2015.
"Trade period continues to be such an engaging property," says AFL Media CEO Peter Campbell. "It's fascinating, every club is involved and this year there were some really big deals that happened."
'I have not seen those numbers before'
Those deals included the surprise move by Hawthorn premiership winner Sam Mitchell to West Coast, Richmond midfielder Brett Deledio moving to the GWS Giants and Gold Coast's Jaeger O'Mearer leaving for Hawthorn.
In particular, Campbell says he was astounded by the traffic on the website as the deadline for the 18 AFL clubs to clinch trade deals loomed in the last week. "At the 2pm closing time on the Thursday we had 65,000 concurrent users on the platform. I have not seen those numbers before."
That came just after what was a record grand final week for the AFL, capped by the Western Bulldogs winning its first premiership since 1954 in an emotional victory over the Sydney Swans. The AFL had 5 million unique visitors to its website that week and an excellent September finals series as a whole.
For that month the AFL averaged 3.8 million unique visitors, according to Neilsen, and while Campbell would not provide context to where that places AFL amongst all websites that figure would put it clear No.1 among all sports and probably have beaten the homepages of Melbourne newspapers The Age and Herald-Sun.
The September result was just below the AFL's record of 4 million for the month of April, when the season started. Video views for all of 2016 are understood to have grown by a double-digit percentage and overall traffic was also up an estimated 5-10 per cent, while social media followers across the official AFL Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat accounts is up 30 per cent from last year.
Next comes Friday's draft, which Campbell predicts good online growth for after a 2015 event that achieved a 39 per cent uplift from the previous year.
http://www.afr.com/business/sport/AFL-d ... 118-gssclw
AFL goes from strength to strength
liar extraordinaire 
, a good medal presentation or a pretend national team others prefer the real thing. 
