I'm back with another update on the state of the site. Today we'll be looking at the level of active accounts over the past three weeks. Still a small set of data I know, but I feel it's best for all interested parties (investors & bloggers) to stay informed. So without further notice,
Daily Active Users
It's safe to say, and rather obvious, that the growth we felt at the start of the month was far superior to the space we're in now. If we proceed without any new growth our active accounts will likely become very predictable, spiking on days where our users have more time to browse the internet. Unfortunately this isn't where the bad news ends.
Percent of Active Users
We're seeing a downward trend in the amount of users active out of our total (which thankfully keeps growing). This likely means we're bleeding users as fast as we're gaining them. For whatever reason this space isn't feeling user friendly. Whether its the community, the content, the psychological factors of posting here, or just the style of the site, we're not doing so hot.
In fact today marks our lowest active user percent (7.3) for the entire month. I decided to put together a daily moving average over the last two days. As you can assume it's trending down, but still a whole 2% (9.45) above where we are today. It's when that gap closes that we'll really need to worry.
Weekly Active Users
Of course this is trending down as well. By it's essence it must. The important thing to note is that it's movement has had a much clearer trajectory than our daily active users. This trajectory likely notes that our core users are who remained after the peak we saw earlier this month. Having a solid base is great, it's how sites thrive. But steemit is in a unique position and will need to attract new users for the payout to blog here to be worthwhile.
This graph gathers data from the previous week. It's why we see the peak almost a week after it occurred in our daily use.
Total Accounts
While growth is always good, in these terms it's indicative of an underlying problem. Linear growth is nearly meaningless if we end up bleeding user's as fast as we get them. We can only take total accounts as an expression of growth if those accounts are engaged in and promoting others to use steemit.
Conclusion
While I'm immensely enjoying my time on the site and getting to interact on a lot of topics that make me think it's looking like we'll end up receiving less exposure to new content. It's up to us to determine if we're satisfied with the content we currently have access to. If not, we can collectively push this brand further and further out through our personal channels. Or, even convert the steem we currently have to advertise into the real world as I've seen a few do.
Our lower retention rates and the seemingly disinterested investor base around steem itself do not bode well for the site. I hope things change, but, as it stands, the data I have is not positive.
Author's Note:
I'll be releasing state of the site reports on things like retention, engagement, comparison to competitors, and internet impression every few weeks. Retention & Engagement will be the most consistent as they are the most important for bloggers, like myself, to understand.
So, if you're interested, please follow!
Data for these charts is available through google docs. All data comes from steemd.
Thank you for reading!