As a stakeholder in Steemit (just like you) I want to know where the organization stands, compared with other similar organizations (I intently avoided the term "competition" here).
So I spent a good hour digging through Wikipedia, Quantcast, Coinmarketcap, Steemd and Quora, in a quest to find relevant information about the market.
I picked only 3 metrics: market cap, alexa rank and monthly visitors. Alexa rank is informative and I don't give it too much credit, it just shows some general interest.
All data is between 2014 and 2016 and some of the information pertains to transactions which already happened (Tumbr was acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion). Another observation about Medium traffic, the 25 millions monthly users is a number pulled from an interview Ev gave to CNN in December, but Quantcast shows only $1.9 millions per month (just an estimate, Medium doesn't have the Quantcast tag, as far as I understand). The traffic for Steemit was based on Steemd "active" users for the last 30 days, but that takes into account only users who voted, commented or posted, the traffic could easily be double or triple than that, but it's in the same ballpark, compared with the other sites.
I didn't give specific sources links for each number, because it will have bloated the text, but you can go to the websites mentioned above and do some basic search. If you come up with different numbers, do let me know.
Below is the aggregated data.
| Site | Market Cap (mils) | Alexa Rank | Monthly Visitors (mils) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steemit | 36 | 16453 | 0.013 |
| Medium | 132 | 333 | 25 |
| StackOverflow | 459 | 43 | 29 |
| 500 | 24 | 234 | |
| Quora | 900 | 154 | 100 |
| Tumblr | 1100 | 39 | 555 |
As you can see, in terms of monthly visitors, Steemit doesn't event count here. It's natural, it's not even past its first year. But it does count in the market cap area and that's a key information. It means money is there and it's ready to flow in whatever direction will be profitable. Who will take that decision and when (given the decentralized structure of Steemit) that's another question.
Another interesting observation is the valuation of Quora which is almost double than StackOverflow or Reddit, at half the number of visitors for Reddit and three times more than StackOverflow. Weird.
But here's where it gets interesting:
The chart represents the market cap distribution among all players.
I see at least two possible scenarios:
- A consolidation between Steemit and Medium. It only looks natural. Together they will have 5% of the market in terms of market cap and Medium will get a big asset by implementing the Steem blockchain technology.
- The launch of a Q&A platform based on the Steem blockchain, completely different than Steemit.com. It may be launched by Steemit Inc, or it may be launched by anybody, using the same blockchain. Hardfork 17 will implement an arbitrarily splitting of the rewards feature that will enable big players to put resources in significant projects, knowing that a revenue-share option is feasible and easy to implement. The rationale behind such a decision is based on the combined marketplace of StackOverflow and Quora, which is 44%. A new player could easily get in this Eldorado. If he scraps only 1%, it will get $13 millions! Quora + StackOverflow = $1,359 millions market cap.
Of course, there are many other metrics, like the value of a member account on each platform, which I didn't take into account, the data here is a bit foggy. Also, I didn't take into account, intently, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. I don't think they're doing the same thing, although they are players on social media too.
My final observation is that the money is still in the blogging platforms, not in the Q&A platforms. The high end of the market cap is occupied by Tumblr (both in terms of market cap and users) and the low end is also occupied by blogging platforms (Steemit and Medium). Q&A, where money flows faster, but where the audience is also more limited and highly niched, is in the middle. That means, for me that, as a blogging platform, it takes a lot of time to grow a loyal audience, 4-6 years. Once you get there, though, the affinity of those users is way bigger than in Q&A platforms.
Questions? Criticism? Other scenarios?
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me 
https://steemit.com/~witnesses