In this post I will share a link to explain why penetration rate is important, and I will rank countries by the penetration rate we have with them here on Hive. This way, we can see the regions where we have the most potential to hit the magic 15% threshold.
15 - It's the Magic Number
The article cites that a result of this is that generally the rate of adoption of a social network in a community is very low until community penetration reaches about 15%. Here, community penetration is the ratio of the number of people in the community on the network to the total number of people in the community.
- Cornell University
As shown in the article above, 15% penetration rate can be seen as a key threshold when it comes to social networks. Before 15%, adoption is slow and difficult. After 15%, adoption becomes rapid and easy, until literally almost every person locally is part of the network. The blogpost above is quite short and easy to read, and forms the premise to this post, but it's copyrighted so rather than repeating the points here or copying it outright, I suggest you follow that link and read the whole (short) post.
Ranking Countries by Hive Penetration Rate
In order to do this, I need to make a few assumptions. There were 19,786 active users (authors and curators) on Hive, and 3288 of them I was able to categorize and connect with a particular country. There is some multiplier I can use which will get a fuller picture of active users per country.
In order to determine the multiplier, I recognize that some percentage of these users are bots and alt accounts, and thus do not represent unique individuals. For now I will treat that as 15%, although I have an active poll and perhaps we can find a more accurate bot factor. There is also going to be variation between countries in terms of likelihood that someone has a location field in that particular country, however for the sake of simplicity I will assume that there is no such variation.
Having made these assumptions, we come to a multiplier of 5.1145, which I will round down to 5 for simplicity.
For the world, we get a penetration rate of 0.00021%. We have a long way to go.
Below are the top 20 countries by penetration rate.
As you can see, we are very, very far away from the coveted 15%, in any country. We have only 6 where the penetration rate is above 0.01%, and five of those are micro-nations, where we have little statistical confidence. After we remove countries with less than 1 million population, we have the rankings below.
Now do you see why I have been harping on about Venezuela and Cuba? Although Cuba is not that far ahead of some others, it is more notable that it has the second highest penetration rate while also growing at a decent clip recently, thus it has potential.
Penetration Rate in Cities
Now, this post may seem fairly pessimistic, because we are leagues away from a 15% penetration rate in any country. However note that the study quoted at the start is not speaking about countries, it only mentions communities. We don't have to measure at the country level, there are several cities around the world with substantial populations where we are likely achieving better penetration rates.
For example there are 3 cities that appear to have relatively large Hive communities:
Caracas, Venezuela
Lagos, Nigeria
Cebu, Philippines
There are several more that are worth looking at. I aim to make a follow up post where I will look at the penetration rate for the cities around the world with the largest local Hive communities.
Edit: fixed some errors with my numbers that emerged as a result of a typo in my SQL query 🤦♂️