After a recent analysis of new users from the Steemit database, there were signs to suggest retention on Steemit was rather low.
You can read that posts here: https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/analyzing-steemit-data-using-power-bi
So I decided to carry out a quick analysis to see how many users were active so far this month (July 17) with posts.
Analyzing the Steemit Database to establish an average retention rate for posting on Steemit
To do this I looked at only 1 table of data in the database, the Accounts table. This table will give us the date that the account was set up and also the last posting date.
I found that so far in July 35,656 accounts have made at least 1 post this month. I used Power BI to work with the data and preformed a simple count on the number of rows in the table that had a post date of 1 July 17 to date. This is only 14% of the total registered accounts.
That led me to another question, the people that did post, when did they register?
Would you believe only 4% of the total number of accounts registered in 2016 have been active with posts this month. That’s pretty poor retention
A whopping 40% of users that registered this month have made a post.
But if we remove the first 2 month and the last two months from the calculations we can get a more accurate reflection of retention. 14% of total accounts posting this month includes June and July which have high % of new user’s posts, hence inflating the overall posting retention.
So excluding the first two and last two month, the average retention for posting is 6%.
I did have some interactive reports with this data, however I can not embed them in Steemit, so here are some of the graphs I produced
Now that we can estimate the % posting retention, what about the users that have not posted this month?
The 86% of registered users.
Well these accounts are not all inactive. Some people don’t post, just vote (Some of which would be voting bots). I think my next analysis will be on the accounts that have not posted, see if I can get a better understand. Obviously I will share the results with you!
Why is retention so low?
I am a minnow, so my experience on Steemit is limited. But in the short time that I have been here, I have witnesses some stuff that would surely contribute to the low retention.
The first thing is how people are being directed to Steemit. There are many videos on Facebook and Youtube that sell Steemit as basically a get rich scheme. People are coming on looking for a quick few bucks. But to their disappointment, their first few posts don’t earn them much and they leave.
Next there is the learning curve. If you don’t come from the Cyrpto world there is a lot to get your head around. The money flow, Steem, SBD, Steempower, powering up, powering down can all be overwhelming for some. And then there is wallets and exchanges too.
And the last thing I will mention is whales and clicks. It can appear to minnows that whales vote for whales, if you are not in the click then you don’t have much of a chance.
Big thanks to @arcange for making this possible with SteemSQL!