Onboarding and User Retention
In my post about cohorts on Hive, @acidyo gave me the suggestion that we could use a similar methodology to take a look at the performance of the OCD onboarding program. It could even be used to encourage volunteer onboarders to help their new recruits along, by making their metrics available to them so that they can see and compare their performance.
As a prelude to that, I want to fill in the wider context of data on onboarding and retention.
I think it represents a good opportunity to look at onboarding in general:
- Who has created the most accounts over the years?
- Does a specific on-boarder increase your likelihood to perform well on Hive?
- Do they increase your likelihood to stick with Hive long term?
- If so, which onboarders are performing better?
Then in a follow up post, I will look at the performance of individual volunteers with the OCD on-boarding program.
None of this is a causal analysis. Just because we see one account having better performance or retention than another, does not mean we can infer a cause, at least not without further analysis
Account Creators
Account creators technically just mean which account spent resources to create yours, but it likely also indicates the tool you used to first join Hive or Steem. Or it may represent the front ends or communities that you had as an entry point to the ecosystem. It could also potentially mean help/support along the way, to make the learning curve a bit easier to handle.
As of my query, 2,439,249 accounts have been created by 7946 creator accounts, making account creation a fairly decentralized process in Hive/Steem history. I can see that I've created over 100, and I'm not even among the top 100 account creators. Below is a chart of just the top 15 (I am assigning a specific color to each of these because they will be used in later charts).
As we can see, the long history during the Steemit Inc. years of Steemit basically being the only game in town, has meant that they still dominate in terms of the raw number of accounts created over the years. @steemmonsters aka Splinterlands has given them a run for their money in the years since. Speaking of that, let's just look at accounts created post-fork.
In the 3 years since the split, 1080632 accounts have been created by 2800 creator accounts. Below are the top 15.
Below you can see the total number of posts made by accounts onboarded by each account creator. I have made it log scale because by standard scale everyone but @steem is non-existant. You can see that although @steemmonsters creates many accounts, few of them become social media users on Hive. I'm not sure why @postpromoter shows empty on the chart, it is not 0.
Below are lifetime and post-fork monthly active authors based on creator accounts.
Although they created by far the most accounts, those created by @steem are now a minority within active authors on Hive.
Does your Creator Account affect your Performance on Hive?
Here is a chart of rewards per post - which should favor steem because of the high price in the 2018 era, but does start to hint that there could be meaningful differences in your success on Hive based on who created your account. At this point that could just be down to the times the account creators were most active.
In order to account for that, we can look at a narrower window of time, choosing a window when most of the above creator accounts were active. We can sum up all the rewards earned within the first year of existence from all accounts created within the window of September 2021 to September 2022.
We can then rank them by rewards per post, during the same windows.
Indeed we can see that yes, who onboarded your account matters substantially - accounts onboarded by @ocd-witness and @ocd earned quite a bit more per post than others.
Retention
So, who created your account matters in terms of rewards, but does it make you more or less likely to stick around?
Using the same period as the last section (September 2021 to September 2022), we can look at how many users were still posting 1 month after joining, and for longer than 6 months.
The below shows how many accounts posted in the second month as a percentage of the first. Recall that the typical rate is below 40%, so the first 7 examples are doing better than average in this regard, and the retention rate for the steemmonsters accounts that did become social media users was extremely high.
Here is the comparison for those who continued to post in their 7th month, ie. after 6 months have passed. @steemmonsters becomes a bit of an outlier here as it seems a lot of accounts didn't post in their first month, starting in their 3rd or 4th of joining, which skews this data point somewhat. Based on the data in my post on cohorts, the network average for this should be around 16 or 17%.
Conclusion
There are many ways in which the account that onboarded you as a user could have affected your performance on Hive in terms of earnings, as well as your likelihood to stay on Hive for the long run. If you were onboarded by @steem, that means you probably saw the days of the highest earnings on the site, and you've now simply had more time to earn. Outside of time, there can still be substantial differences in performance.
Retention rates are also different per creator account, but the relationship between performance and retention isn't immediately clear from the charts.
As noted at the start, in my next post I will take a look at the performance and retention for individual volunteers in the OCD onboarding initiative.
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