How Many Daily Active Users Does Steem Have? Live Witness Update #3

in dlive •  7 years ago  (edited)

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250,000+ daily active users on Steem is my estimate based on 50,000+ transacting every day AND the number of unique users active on all Steem applications including steemit.com, @dlive, steemdb, etc. This estimate of 250,000+ daily active users on Steem comes from applying the same definition that most database driven platforms like Google and Facebook rely on to define an active user instead of only counting the number of accounts making transactions.

When we remember that a blockchain is really just a fancy name for a database and that everyone accessing the database every day counts as an active user, we see that we have a lot more "active users" on Steem than we can easily report.

Why Does It Matter?


In the live witness forum hosted by @aggroed last week which I uploaded a full replay of at https://steemit.com/dlive/@jerrybanfield/1bcfe7f0-4c8d-11e8-aa5b-83da28bb4ae3 we heard many of us participating, including me, referencing the number of active daily users on Steem in a way that makes it seem like a problem because we only included the number of accounts transacting every day.

By using the number of accounts transacting as the number of active users, we only count the top 5 or 10 percent of most engaged users on Steem as active. When we consider that around 50,000 accounts out of 920,000+ transact every day, this makes it seem like we have a problem with user retention and that everyone involved needs to work to solve it.

I was shocked to realize during the witness forum last week that even with my seven years of experience in digital marketing, I had not stopped to consider what we were choosing to call an "active user" on Steem and the impact of this on the conversation about our user activity on Steem!

Defining Active Users Accurately!


An ACTIVE USER in digital marketing includes EVERYONE using a website or application via any interaction with the DATABASE from a UNIQUE IP ADDRESS. This definition includes signed in users engaging, signed in users only pulling data by browsing, and signed out users only pulling data by browsing. Read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monthly_active_users.

How Do We Calculate ACTIVE USERS?


To see how we calculate active users, it may be easier to start by thinking about YouTube. YouTube's number of active users will include all unique viewers on every video on every application from youtube.com, mobile applications, and embedded videos on every website. That total for any one day is the number of active users on YouTube.

If YouTube only included users liking videos, uploading videos, and commenting on videos, the number of active users reported on YouTube would only represent a fraction of the total. Meanwhile on Steem ...

Users Transacting vs Active Users on Steem!


When we consider the number of people on Steem reading posts but not making any transactions, we see the true number of ACTIVE USERS for STEEM is much higher than just those transacting. In addition to transactions, we need to remember to inlude among active users the following:

  1. Users with a Steem account who do not vote or comment on a post.
  2. All readers on steemit.com without an account or not signed into an account.
  3. Everyone browsing feeds on mobile apps, watching videos on applications like @dlive, and anything else where a transaction is not taking place.

How Do We Count the Number of Active Users on Steem?


To get the true number of active users on Steem using the same methods standard in digital marketing which are used by almost every major company, we need to include every unique IP address making any use of the database we call the Steem blockchain including

  1. Every account transacting on the Steem blockchain plus
  2. Every unique page view on steemit.com, dlive.io, steem.io, dlive.io, d.tube, dsound.audio, fundition.io, steemdb.com, steemd.com, and any other website using the steem blockchain plus
  3. Every unique interaction with a mobile application or Steem wallet including viewing a page or a balance without making any transaction.
  4. Minus any duplicates. For example, if one user likes a post on steemit.com, uploads a video on @dlive, and looks at data on steemdb.com, we only count that as one active user.

To get the accurate number of ACTIVE USERS DAILY for Steem, we will need all of the data for every single application dependent on the Steem blockchain aggregated by unique users because these numbers combined represent the total number of people actively using the Steem blockchain in all forms.

~250,000 Active Users Daily for Steem?


I estimate the true number of active users when we consider all of the data is 5 to 10 times the number transacting every day because I believe based on the data I have seen previously that steemit.com gets hundreds of thousands of unique page views every day which when combined with every other way to access Steem adds up to at least 250,000 a day.

For validation, let us again consider YouTube. How many videos do we what without liking or commenting? I believe the average on YouTube from what I have seen is about 95% or greater of the among of "passive" viewers that watch a video without liking or commenting versus about 5% or less of those "engaged" which are leaving a like or a comment. My own experience validates this both as a creator and a viewer. My best videos get about a 20% like and comment ratio while most are 5% or less.

When we translate the amount of "passive" interactions with a database where the viewer is browsing only into Steem, an estimate of 5 times as many active users as accounts transacting is conservative. The true number is probably 10 to 20 times higher than the number of accounts transacting. I chose 250,000 because this number is almost certainly accurate as a minimum with much higher numbers possible.

Is @ned an Active User?


As the CEO of Steemit Inc, @ned said last year at Steemfest 2 that he mostly just reads posts on Steem without commenting, upvoting, or otherwise transacting on the blockchain. When we take a look at @ned's profile at https://steemworld.org/@ned we see that most days @ned would not be counted among accounts transacting because he does not upvote, comment, or transfer Steem/SBD most days.

Is it most accurate to include @ned as an active Steem user given he reads posts most days on steemit.com and/or alternative interfaces but does not make a transaction with his account?

No More User Retention Problem!


With a more inclusive definition of active users, we now are able to eliminate the apparent "user retention" problem because we begin to see that many users, especially new accounts and users thinking about joining or waiting for a response to a sign up, do visit steemit.com every day but often are not signed in or do not vote any posts. Given the account creation process can take weeks, a lot of new users have been very active reading data from the Steem blockchain before making a post and are in the habit of not voting on posts or commenting from the beginning because of an inability to do so prior to signing up.

When I first started learning about and researching Steem, I was on steemit.com every day and did not make any transactions. For every one of us that is here and transacting every day, there are at least 4 more of us lurking every day.

Updated Steem Reports by @penguinpablo!


Thank you very much to @penguinpablo for publishing my favorite reports showing the current data on Steem each day and week because we can see proof of the growing value of our blockchain in your reports every day! @penguinpablo was kind enough to hear me out after I originally posted a shorter version of this as a comment on his recent weekly report. The third heading today shows "daily accounts transacting" on Steem along with a description of what this means in terms of active users to help each of us avoid getting the users transacting confused with the number of active users.

We hope this will help each of us to communicate the huge amount of activity we have on our blockchain every day and help each of us remember to include everyone that is participating without making a transaction!

Will Steemit Inc Help Us with Reporting Active Users?


@andrarchy as the Content Director for Steemit Inc, will you help us maintain awareness of the amount of unique visitors to steemit.com each day, week, or month because this will help us to better understand the amount of active users on our blockchain?

With steemit.com being the number one interface for the Steem blockchain and every unique user on steemit.com be a part of the total active users for Steem, seeing the number of visits to steemit.com makes it easier for us as investors, bloggers, merchants, and developers to understand the value the Steem blockchain offers.

What About Bots?


Based on my 13 years of experience doing nearly everything on Facebook from finding a girlfriend to launching a business and building page with over 2 million likes, I estimate 50% or so of the daily active user activity reported by Facebook is bots ranging from automatic posts to Facebook to huge collections of bot accounts that do not represent a real users. While in principle we might like to think active users should only include real human beings making proof of brain transactions, the standard in digital marketing is to include all the activity which generally means almost every platform's active user data reflects a lot of bots.

Therefore, bots on Steem are no different than bots anywhere else when it comes to being included in active users. We include all the bots along with the human beings in the reports and accept that the true number of human beings involved may be a lot less than the active users.

Bid Bot Questions and Answers!


Speaking of bots, in addition to talking about active users in this live witness update, I will also present a bid bot tutorial live because I am consistently seeing a lot of questions and confusion about using bid bots. For those new to bid bods, I recommend a look at https://steembottracker.com/.

Get Answers to More Questions Live!


With doing Steem full time as a witness at https://steemit.com/~witnesses, every Wednesday between 10 am to 12 pm eastern time I intend to be available to accept live questions and answers after a short initial presentation showing what I have been thinking about most as a witness during the previous week. The purpose of this is to be accountable to you each week as to what I have contributed to our community and available for you to get answers from me about anything you want to know including an immediate live reaction to your questions.

Thank you very much for reading about this live witness update which I hope was helpful in maintaining the hope and faith we have in our Steem blockchain's ability to help make this the beautiful world we intend to live together in!

Love,

Jerry Banfield

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Would be nice to have an official Steemit portal where we can see detailed stats of user activity on the platform. Easily accessible data will also help external news outlets and bloggers when they write about Steemit.

@techwizardry yes I will love to see more data added on https://steem.io/ alongside what we already have!

@jerrybanfield you said that steem will go past the all time high in satoshis...

The all time high is around 650,000 satoshis which is around $59.48 ... does that really seem realistic

Yes because our minds often have a hard time comprehending how good things can go while picturing bad is easy. When I had Ethereum at $9 I had a hard time picturing it being $50 let alone $600. When Bitcoin was $200 it seemed insane to picture it at $19,000 for a high and around $9,000 today. The best blockchains still have 100x growth possible while most will fade away. Bitcoin I think is on the way out as exchanges add fiat trading, ETH markets, and BCH. In five years I doubt we will even use Bitcoin as everything is traded in fiat. I think beating the all time high in BTC for Steem is easily achievable

I just think steem is different... I can upvote myself and get more steem...I can't do that with bitcoin...

I hope the price does spike that high but that would mean when I upvote myself I will make like $120 per post...which will be amazing but I feel it will be unsustainable

It will be unsustainable if SBD is much above $1 like it is now. I think SBD will need to be around $1 maybe even lower for steem to moon.

There will definitely be waves of up and down in the market while early adopters will benefit from the highest rewards as with other cryptocurrencies. In Bitcoin how the miners buy or sell impacts the price a lot just the same as on Steem with the difference being a lot fewer miners get the bulk of the rewards compared to Steem.

If steem hits $60 what US$ value would it make sense for SBD to have?

If SBD was also around $60 that would be ridiculous... like mind blowingly ridiculous and outrageous....almost all of us would be making decent/RIDICULOUS sums of money. Even me at 1,200 SP would BALLLLLLL with those prices

$1 maybe $2 at the most.

In five years I doubt we will even use Bitcoin as everything is traded in fiat.

To clarify things for me, do you think that BTC will die?

BTC is likely to go the way of myspace where people will just stop using it in favor of other cryptocurrencies because one the idea starts to slip that it is a store of value and exchanges go to trading directly to fiat and other cryptocurrencies, the big Bitcoin holders will unload and it will all be over for BTC.

That could become true one day but Bitcoin itself probably won't ever be forgotten like MySpace

I must agree with what you said here. From when I got into crypto in 2013, I NEVER pictured LiteCoin making it back up to $20 at the time. Now trading at $150 Approximately.
BitCoin I just didn't expect it to go from 3k to 19k so fast, and it did.

I think Steem will be the same thing as LiteCoin. It's trading low right now. <$5. Yeah switching from $3 - 4 back to 3 is crazy, but add a 0 to that and it'll make a difference.

Other Blockchains will someday pass up bitcoin as bitcoin we all know will fade a way. It won't die out completely because there will always be a node online somewhere in the world. Even after the world Apocalypse. BitCoin is a resource hog. It consumes so much power that is destroying our world. To mine the coin, you need massive amounts of money for the hardware. You need a warehouse to put all the computers. And even with all that, you won't be mining a fraction of the hash power.

The video wouldn't load for me. Great points though but I do hope we can do better with official user retention.

@jerrybanfield, I think the next contributions to Steemit are as follows:

1 . A formal webpage for Steemit. This will have the normal content as any other cryptocurrency like:

  • official developed downloadable desktop wallets that are simple and does not need programming experience.
  • official news like upcoming outages, meetings, changes, updates, etc.
  • official published roadmap
  • official staff profiles

2 . Active effort to get both STEEM and SBD on many exchanges
3 . Work to get STEEM officially added to Trezor and Ledger

I hope to see all of these and I am sure that Steemit Inc is working as much as possible to get added to exchanges and wallets!

Thanks for the response. Did you know that there is no major multilingual exchange that lists both STEEM and SBD?

HitBTC and Poloniex wallets have been broken for months. Binance and Huobi don't list SBD. Bittrex is English only language and Upbit is Korean only language. We are missing a multilingual exchange. What about the STEEM/Steemit users that only know German, French, Russian, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, etc.? There are ways around this, but not very user friendly to require all these users to use additional methods to deal with SBD earnings.

Hello @JerryBanfield ,
Coin transfer to @JerryBanfield (1.000 SBD)
[Open your wallet]
Recipient: @JerryBanfield
Amount: 1.000 SBD
Memo: https://steemit.com/adsactly/@nurulafsar03/cryptoanalysis-for-the-month-of-april-2018
Time: 2018-05-02T20:55:09
I was voted on steem bot tracker but I do not get any upvote yet
only I got a reply: Coin transfer from @JerryBanfield (0.001 SBD)
[Open your wallet]
Sender: @JerryBanfield
Amount: 0.001 SBD
Memo: Thank you for bidding! Will you please add me to your witness votes or set me as a proxy at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because this will help us increase the value of Steem together?
Time: 2018-05-02T20:59:09
Hello @JerryBanfield
I am not getting any reply from your end
if you will not upvote then refund my 1 SBD please

I think there is a problem is defining active user this way. Atleast for now, industry defines an active user as some one engaging with a network or using the network.You can argue viewing the network shall be counted as active. I think you should atleast discount unique or first time users and users from FB/searc/twitter etc. If some one daily browse steemit page for content, then he should be counted. These are industry standard matric used to compare networks, value them and spend money on such network (business model). We have to properly define the nunbers and then compare, then only we know how much the network is valued.

wow. that is a lot of users. thankyou for the data!

Great video @jerrybanfield . Very informative and you answered some questions.
Also I voted for you as witness .
Stay good !

Good morning @jerrybanfield , I'm happy to be one of these 250,000 assets in steemit.
, I feel very motivated on this site, I love to comment, make friends and learn from others.
Happy day :)

I agree with most of this blog. However, the part about the bots is misleading. I believe bot use is much heavier in steemit than facebook and the average site. After all, using bots helps us to make more money than would without bots. Then think about that money compounding. Bots put us way ahead of the game.

Hey Jerry, any rough estimate how many of the 1MM+ users (active and inactive) are a result of multiple accounts by a single user?

TIA.

My guess is about 10% to 20% with 80% to 90% being unique users. If anyone is aware of a report with data on this I will love to see it!

I'd be interested to see this. Ever since I found a collection of over 7000 accounts controlled by one user, I've been a little worried about how many actual people there are here.

Thanks. Man, I'd love to see one too. Very important.

Has the witness team talked about limiting this, or is it even discouraged here at all?

Thank you for the bot option.

Congratulations @jerrybanfield!
Your post was mentioned in the Steemit Hit Parade in the following category:

  • Upvotes - Ranked 5 with 888 upvotes

Too many of us are not living our dreams because we are living our fears,you have been so good here..

I feel like their is a lot of account squatting which might not be a bad play but it is interesting how many accounts have been registered with no activity going on.

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  ·  7 years ago Reveal Comment

Many sites prefer to use total monthly users. This removes the day to day variable that can take place. Spreading the numbers over a month gives a better representation of what is going on. There are many site I do not frequent daily but will hit up a couple times a week.

The daily number is easily divisible by 30 to get the daily...yet one who only shows up once in a while will still most likely be counted.

Either way, it was a good catch.

Yes I will love to see a total monthly users statistic for Steem because using everything I shared here the number is probably over a million already!

Hello @JerryBanfield ,
Coin transfer to @JerryBanfield (1.000 SBD)
[Open your wallet]
Recipient: @JerryBanfield
Amount: 1.000 SBD
Memo: https://steemit.com/adsactly/@nurulafsar03/cryptoanalysis-for-the-month-of-april-2018
Time: 2018-05-02T20:55:09
I was voted on steem bot tracker but I do not get any upvote yet
only I got a reply: Coin transfer from @JerryBanfield (0.001 SBD)
[Open your wallet]
Sender: @JerryBanfield
Amount: 0.001 SBD
Memo: Thank you for bidding! Will you please add me to your witness votes or set me as a proxy at https://steemit.com/~witnesses because this will help us increase the value of Steem together?
Time: 2018-05-02T20:59:09
Hello @JerryBanfield
I am not getting any reply from your end
if you will not upvote then refund my 1 SBD please

You will get the upvote if your bid is accepted.

If not accepted then? bid money have to refund or not? if not retuning bid money then what will do?

@jerrybanfield i am a big fan of urs but do u ever read your followers comments because i never seen a single response from you even when someone shoot u out u dont even look at me lmao

@ychaudrys I responded to this in the live stream and often there are more comments than I can read each day. Today I am grateful I am able to read and respond to most of the new comments today. Tomorrow may be different!

i have no power for upvote so
Thanks for sharing this post.

Bots some time help alot .i used you bot it give me much votes then others

Thank you @ jerry banfield
I have benefited a lot from this publication and I see that steemit.com will soon exceed the proportion of members of Facebook and Twitter, as well as YouTube
The very active members who own steempower are the catalyst for the rest of the members
Thank you

The growth will never stop...

Good mister if something is not correct just report father

great post @jerrybanfield! It was a while I was guessing how many active users there were on Steemit. One thing though that came to mind when I created my account is that it took it a while. The process at the beginning I believe is too slow to have fast growth. On the other hand, It makes sense, since as of now Steemit is still in the Beta phase. What do you think about that?

great post @jerrybanfield! It was a while I was guessing how many active users there were on Steemit. One thing though that came to mind when I created my account is that it took it a while. The process at the beginning I believe is too slow to have fast growth. On the other hand, It makes sense, since as of now Steemit is still in the Beta phase. What do you think about that?

good discussion / it's encouraging the number of different aps and venues for accessing the steem blockchain. steemit itself still seems to have a bit of an identity crisis, but maybe it's just growing pains

Definitely growing pains which tend to lead to immense value because without growing pains no growth!

Hello dear I was a vote you on steem bot tracker with 1 SBD but I do not get any upvote can you please check ? approximate 1 hour before

good evening excellent post, congratulations for being a successful user, I want to join that triumph, since I am new and public at every moment and I feel that my work is not valued, I would like and support if you are so kind to vote and read my post , Greetings from Venezuela, friend, thanks!

How many people in the world are now the member of the Steem?

13431428814602.jpgDQmRpvCbtEv6uxWs7ub8rmZnfAdkA2BeeUfxSKCV45azJw8.gif

Thank you for the BID BOT portion! I have been completely lost... You Rock. Thanks again!

I'm interested in your post! Thank you.

Hi Jerry! I have a question for you. How can I contact you?

Hello, Jerry! I was a student of yours on Udemy for a while before I discovered the other platforms where you post.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I was irritated whenever you spent valuable lesson time talking about how much money you were making. "How did this apply to me" I always wondered.

This is definitely one of your meatier posts, one that bears rereading.
I might even be tempted to finally vote for a witness (you). Thank you for the valuable information.

Well I appreciate some of the Data you have gathered and presented here Jerry

V. interesting stuff thanks for your work for steem, your expertise and insight. will follow as I hope Steemit will continue to evolve and to grow!

Ver informative. Thanks a lot Jerry
Upvoted and followed

Another quick question for ya, Jer..

When I scroll through my comments drop down, I see tons of comments where it shows a value, but when I click on rewards, and then "curation" it says I've earned only $.01 all of last week.

What am I missing?

great post @jerrybanfield! It was a while I was guessing how many active users there were on Steemit. One thing though that came to mind when I created my account is that it took it a while. The process at the beginning I believe is too slow to have fast growth. On the other hand, It makes sense, since as of now Steemit is still in the Beta phase. What do you think about that?