IF Super Bowl THEN…
Over the years, we have seen a sizable increase in the use of IFTTT Recipes by people who follow sporting events. With Super Bowl 50 on the horizon, we were intrigued to look closer at how people use IFTTT to follow their favorite teams and how the Carolina Panthers and Denver Broncos fans stack up.
Top NFL Recipes
In total, our community has added close to 60,000 Recipes to help them track the progress of their favorite NFL teams. A few of the most popular NFL related Recipes today are:
Fireworks in the living room
Smart light bulbs are just starting to get adopted in connected homes, and we are seeing some ingenious uses of smart lights for games. Philips Hue and LIFX are two of the most popular smart lights that people on IFTTT connect with. Two years ago just before Super Bowl 48, IFTTT users created 2,522 recipes to control smart lights and receive game updates. That number increased to 7,340 Recipes by Super Bowl 49 in 2015. By the time of Super Bowl 50, a total of 15,631 Recipes have been created to send ambient notifications to smart lights by football fans.
Fan base
This is the first Super Bowl for Carolina Panthers Cam Newton. We see a similarly meteoric rise in the number of fans who follow the Panthers with our ESPN Channel. Since January 2015, while Broncos followers on IFTTT grew by 40%, Panthers followers grew by over 70% in the same time period!
Peyton Manning’s career stretched across the continent, and so does the fan base of the Broncos. According to our data, there is a generous amount of love toward the Broncos throughout all the continental time zones. In comparison, Panthers fans are overwhelmingly concentrated on the East Coast.
Keep your friends close and your enemies closer
Do fans keep close tabs on their favorite team’s rivals? According to our data, the answer is NO. The vast majority of the IFTTT community follows a single team closely. However, there is a small dedicated group of fans who follow multiple teams, with some interesting crossovers.
Carolina Panthers vs. Denver Broncos
Finally, how do Panthers fans and Broncos fans stack up technology-wise?
Data at IFTTT
Though we haven’t yet figured out how to predict who wins the Super Bowl with our data, these insights and more help us improve our services for the IFTTT community. Expect to see more intriguing observations by our data team in the coming months.
Originally published at engineering.ifttt.com on February 3, 2016.
