A month ago I had published an article about Churn and retention of users on Steemit on a quarterly basis, though I had missed posting the retention data in it.
Since a financial quarter came to an end, I decided to revisit those queries and check how Steemit is faring this quarter.
This month saw a whopping 50000 new additions to Steemit. I had picked up these queries last week to publish this article when Steemit was about to get it's 400000th user. But it's main web server was subjected to a DDOS attack last Friday. However, the Graphene blockchain was not affected; users were able to access it through other websites and apps showing us a realtime example of the benefit of a decentralised storage system.
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 can visit https://www.steemd.com/@username and replace your username in the url.
Tools used:
- Blockchain data is sourced from steemsql.com by
.
- 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:
Churn and Retention rates:
- 50.55% or nearly 5 out 10 Steemit users have stopped voting in the last 3 months compared to 41.5% when I ran the same queries last month. However the user base has grown by 14% this month.
- Steemit is able to retain Orcas, Dolphins and Minnows effectively as around their retention rate is in the 70% to 80% range.
- 17 of the total 44 whales has stopped curating content in the last 3 months.
- 1 out of 2 new users or the ones without much vesting power have stopped using the service.
Vest power and User base Distribution:
See how the user base and vesting power is distributed in the blockchain,
- 98% of the users fall under the Plankton category and hold 2% of vesting power.
- Whales hold 71% of the total vesting power and constitute 0.01% of the total userbase.
Conclusion:
The situation looks grimmer when compared to the last month's charts. What is more disconcerting is that the 50% Churn rate comes after the addition of 50000 new accounts, in reality 58% of the users who were available last month have stopped voting. I am sorry to sound like a pessimist but unless Steemit finds a way to sustain and encourage new users it is going to have a tough time ahead.
Check out some of my other posts:
How USD became the world's favourite reserve currency?
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.
I am a part of the Steemit Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BIsteemit. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit data, please do contact me or any of the #bisteemit team and we will do our best to help you...
Join the fabulous Steemit Blogger Discord community:
https://discord.gg/e5XFZKa
Cheers and happy steeming,
dbdecoy
