May ’18 New Steemit User Report – Blockchain Business Intelligence

At the beginning of every month I prepare a report containing details of new users for the previous month. In April we broke 1 million registered accounts.  Lets see what else we can find out about new users

Aim of Analysis

The aim of this analysis is:

• Establish how many new users registered

• Establish what % of accounts have posts

• Find out who are the new big players in terms of SP

• See what accounts are acting suspiciously

• Establish if there is a break in any of the trends from previous periods 

 Repository

https://github.com/steemit/steem

The Data-source and Query

As always to produce this report I connect to Steemsql (paid subscription services held and managed by @arcange ) with Power BI. The SQL query used to gather the data for this report was

Select *

FROM Accounts (NOLOCK)

where   

( created >= CONVERT(datetime,'05/01/2018')

AND created< CONVERT(datetime,'06/01/2018')

Once I loaded the data into Power BI, I then carried out transformation and calculations using DAX language.

If you missed the full April ‘18’s report you can check it out here:

https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/april-18-new-steemit-user-report-blockchain-business-intelligence

Overview

April ’18 Overview

  

May ‘18 Overview

 

May was the slowest month this year in terms of new user registrations. Jan 18 seen 159K new uses, Feb dropped to 73k and March jumped back up to 126K new user, April was down to 62K.  And now May is down to 60K. That is an decrease of 50% on March.

In May ’17 there were 7,754 new account. May ’18 is therefore up 700 % on the same period last year.

Almost 15% of new accounts completed their ‘about’ section in their profile and almost 6.5% have added a link to an external reference. 1% more accounts completed their about section than last month, which was also up on the previous month.

Why are these values of importance? Well I use these to assess potential the quality of the user. If they have come to Steemit to browse then chances are they may not complete these fields. However if they are experienced bloggers or have experience in social media marketing, then they know the importance of competing this information.

It has also been proven with other analysis, this metric for measuring the quality of the new user relates most to retention levels. It is therefore good to see even a small rise in these values

Posting Activity

The % of new accounts with posts was 35%, up from 32.7%. The % of accounts with 10+ posts is 14.18% which is consistent with last month.

  

We can see from the pie chart above, 67.32% of new accounts have not yet posted. 7.28% have made one post and 3.9% have made two posts. Looking at March values, April results are rather consistent.

Strange Activity

There are very very few extraordinary accounts on Steemit that can push out multiple posts a day of high quality. From discussion with other experienced steemain and whales, account producing large volumes of comments or posts could very well be bots, scammers or plagiarists and the activity is deemed suspicious till otherwise cleared up. Not all accounts that produce numerous comments a day are scam or bots or low quality but these are in minority.

Below are the new accounts from April that have suspicious activity. Tagging @steemcleaners and @cheetah to cross reference.

  

I must add that I have not checked the integrity of all these accounts or posts, I struggle to get 1 data post done a day and I know from talking with writers, good form content can take a number of hours to write and post. 

New High Value SP Accounts set up in May

The table below shows the new Steemit Users sorted by Vesting Shares.

 

@thegoldengoose has about 71K SP. This SP has been leased to a number of accounts for profit. 

@richman2 has about 40K SP, most of which has been delegated out

@crypt0f1end has about 33K SP and is also currently delegating.

A big big welcome to all the new users that registered with Steemit in May ’18. If you did join in May ’18 you might be interested in seeing how those are doing after a year on Steemit. You can read that report here:

https://steemit.com/steemit/@paulag/if-you-joined-steemit-in-may-2017-then-this-is-for-you-happy-steemit-birthday

Conclusion

May was a slower month in terms of new user registrations. The slowest month to date this year. However the report does not stop there and although the number of accounts was low, other stats are slightly more positive, as in the % of accounts adding about information to the profile.

Looking at the accounts with suspicious activity, it does not take a genius to work out many of these accounts are bot accounts and quite a few will be added to my personal blacklist.

Looking at the accounts that powered up, well sad as it is, many of these are just delegating for profit, some also seem to be delegating to voting circles.  But there are also some genuine accounts and names I recognise.

Normally I do not include my personal opinion on the data.  But today I want to talk a little about the downturn in the number of new accounts.  I do not think this is an issue as currently the people on steemit are not able to visit every blog and some awesome authors are falling through the cracks.  Less accounts = less shit to filter.  However what does concern me is that when looking at some of the new accounts, its obvious they are sudo names, many are scammers and bots.  Some of which were set up by Steemit Inc.  If I can spot these, why is steemit inc allowing them be set up??

I am part of a Blockchain Business Intelligence community. We all post under the tag #BlockchainBI. If you have an analysis you would like carried out on Steemit or Blockchain data, please do contact me or any of the#BlockchainBI team and we will do our best to help you...

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