I like tracking stats for various things. I've logged my car's fuel economy, my household energy usage and also my performance on various social sites. It's good to see how a site is doing overall. I'm not sure if anyone can know the exact numbers apart from the site owners (in most cases, but various services make an educated guess based on public information and people using browser plugins. Of course Steemit is a bit different.
Hypestat pulls together various data. Some of this comes from Alexa, but they manage to provide more details for free about where visitors are coming from.
The trends for Steemit are good. Visitors and views are growing. The views per visitor is important as it shows people do look around. Of course pure views don't matter so much here as it's only views that actually make us money. Hypestat assumes the site is making money through advertising. Steemit need people to register and get involved. With all the data in the blockchain people can extra lots of data about how Steemit is doing (e.g. SteemStats), but it's good to know how the general internet sees it.
It's still early days for Steemit. Around 60,000 users, but not all of those are active. That's tiny these days. Tsu got to around 5 million in under two years, but very few of those were active at the end. Steemit is still pretty geeky and that will deter some casual users. It will be interesting to see progress in the next few months.