Who Are Steemit Users?

in #steemit6 years ago (edited)

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This morning I found myself wondering who Steemit users really are? I use Steemit as a general condenser, but we can look closer to individual ones.

By various posts written on the subject, we know Steemians are mostly driven by:

  • rewards (money)
  • creating good (great?) content
  • "came in for the money, but stayed for the community", so community

There are of course the developers, maybe some witnesses as well, who don't post as often. They may be incentivized by the rewards, but I think the best ones wouldn't stay if they didn't think the blockchain and the ecosystem has the chance to a bright future.

Then, we have a few stats that would be interesting but most likely we won't have them:

  • how many unique entities (individuals, groups, companies) have accounts on the Steem blockchain?
    I don't expect such an information to be known, there isn't any blogging or social media platform where you can't create, if you want to, multiple accounts, as far as I know.
    Do you think there are 2.1bn unique entities on Facebook? Let's be serious!
    But maybe we could define what a reasonable number of multiple accounts can be for different use-cases on the Steem blockchain?
  • how many (and which?) of the existing accounts are: 1) individual 2) non-profit projects 3) for-profit projects 4) accounts used for promotion (including bidbots/resteem services etc.)
    I don't see identity verification as a requirement, more as a possibility if you want to be part of certain communities / individual competitions / etc., as described by Ned when he talked about the oracles and gave the example with the running contest.
  • the ratio between unique active and inactive entities


We can then ask ourselves where do users come from, geographically.

That's a tricky question to answer, as far as I know.

If users create their account via the Steemit interface, which requires phone number verification, then Steemit Inc probably has a database with them and can determine the countries each of these account holders come from. But accounts can be created anonymously, using paid services (or if you have the know-how), in which case they can be from anywhere.

Anyway, we don't have access to Steemit Inc. database, so what's left?

We can check the geo-location of traffic on Alexa. It is an indicator, but a poor one, for at least two reasons:

  • People use different apps to access the Steem blockchain. If you check several of them, you'll see the order of the top countries is different
  • Alexa ranking includes all visits to the respective site, regardless if the person who lands on the site has an account or is a visitor who just came across an article or is interested in joining

What these tops can tell us more than where are the users from, is where are the respective apps most popular. That's a good indication too.

What are the main interests of content creators in the ecosystem?

The answer to this question is relatively easy, but not 100% accurate, because using some tags is incentivized or mandatory (some apps add their own tag by default).

We can check the most used tags on the blockchain and we can determine that people of the Steem ecosystem are mostly:

  • blogging / vlogging about life, food, health; story tellers
  • photography experts or enthusiasts, artists, musicians, poets
  • sharing information about the Steem blockchain and the ecosystem, creating tutorials, being helpful etc.
  • sharing travel stories and photos/videos
  • tech- or science-oriented, blockchain geeks
  • (would-be) investors, crypto enthusiasts
  • interested in the funny stuff, memes
  • gamers

There are of course other interests, less popular now, and which could use a better coverage in the future.

Some national tags or app-specific tags are also highly used.

What type of content is usually created on the Steem blockchain?

  • blogs
  • video / vlogs
  • live stream
  • images, Instagram-style
  • zaps (tweets)
  • podcasts
  • projects (development, translation, documentation etc.)
  • crowdfunding projects
  • forums
  • gigs, Fiverr-style (in the future)
  • etc. (many more to come)

Conclusion

Knowing the audience is generally what advertisers are seeking. But since Steemit has no advertisements, then I think it can be useful to the users of the platform, for future content creation. How do we use it now?

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