Steemit Curation based Quarterly Churn and Retention levels

Due to some unavoidable personal reasons I had to stay away from my machine for the past couple of months. This meant that I had lost track of the happenings here and even in most of the cryptocurrency rallies.

A quick recap of the last retention report published 3 months ago
:

• On an average 1 out of 2 users did not vote for 90 days. This is a serious issue for a platform that is built upon the idea of value for votes.
• 1 out of 2 new users or the ones with less voting power had literally stopped using the service.

It is good to see that Steem is finally picking up steam on the monetary front. But has the platform improved it's user retention levels and engagement levels?
Let us see...

What is Churn here?

Churn rate is defined as the percentage rate at which users have stopped subscribing to a service. It is 'Likes' for Facebook, so votes are the equivalent here since articles depend on votes. Because without votes, steemit becomes an echo chamber with each user posting his articles into oblivion while no one else notices it.

Here we are looking at Quarterly Churn which means that a user has refrained from voting for the past 90 days.

What is Retention rate?

Retention is the opposite of Churn indicating that a user is still using a service. Mathematically, retention rate can be defined as 100-churn rate or 1-churn. the retention rate shown here is for the last quarter.

User levels:

I am using the same user category definitions as in the last month's Churn article so that we can get a clear picture of the Churn and retention levels of users with varying vesting powers.

Vesting Power	Category
Above 1000 MVests	Whale
Above 100 MVests	Orca
Above 10 MVests	Dolphin
Above 1 MVest	Minnow
Below 1 MVest	Plankton

To find out how many Vesting shares you have visit www.steemd.com/@username

Tools used:

• Blockchain data is sourced from steemsql.com by @arcange.
• The data is compiled and charted on Google Sheets - an excellent online alternative to MS Excel. Check out how it is done here.

The Method:

• The category of the user is derived from the Accounts table along with vesting shares.
• The last voting date by the user is taken from the Acoounts table.
• For chart, the category is matched with the voter of the post.

The Results:

Quarterly Churn and Retention rates:

• The average Quarterly Churn stands at 58.8% an increase from 50.55% of the previous quarter. This means that 6 out of 10 users available now have not voted in the last quarter.
• The planktons or the new users are the least engaged ones on this platform with a retention rate of just 40.74%
• The platform has been successful in increasing its retention rate among the other users though.

Vest power and User base Distribution:

Below is the user base and its vesting power that is distributed across the blockchain,

• There is not much difference in the user base distribution as compared to the last quarter.
• The overall percentage of Vesting power held by the Whales has decreased to 67.75% from 71.07% in the last quarter.
• There has been a minor increase in the vesting power of other user categories when compared with the last quarter's numbers.

Conclusion:

A platform that is only able to hold 4 out of 10 users is really in dire straits especially when the it had a 50% retention rate in the previous quarter. I as still sounding pessimistic as in my previous report's conclusion but the rally in Steem price looks like a bubble that might break anytime considering that the platform that fuels it is in disrepair. A better retention rate and good quality content is the only way out of this situation.

Check out some of my other posts:
How USD became the world's favourite reserve currenncy?
Hourly and day wise analysis of how posts get votes till the first payout
Votting pattern of a top curator in the first hour of a post's publishing

Cheers,
dbdecoy