Market Share of the Steem Blockchain by Application: August 2018

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Introduction and Scope

I'm trying out Steeditor for this month's analysis of the Steem blockchain applications. Practice what you preach and all that. It's at number 38 in the August top 50 Steem applications. Let's see if we can get it a bit higher for September!

As always in this monthly analysis of Steem applications:

• I break down all the numbers for the top 50 applications;
• I give an overview of any new developments appearing in the rankings;
• I look at the market share of the top applications and look at Steemit's dominance;
• I consider how user growth is progressing for the largest applications; and
• I check how many applications user are engaging with.

In addition for this month:

• I analyse the mass of "other" comments to make sure no applications are being overlooked and shed some light as to the make-up of those 600k mystery comments.

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Results and Conclusions

1. Top 50 Applications by posts, authors and rewards - August 2018

First up the August results. Following on from last month's analysis improvements this table now includes all posts and comments (rather than just top level posts). This gives a more balanced view for applications that use comments as the main method of contribution (for example, Musing).

The overall ranking used to order the table is an average of the author ranking and the post payout ranking. Numbers of posts have not been included in this ranking statistic due to the potential distortion from spam through some channels.

As usual the order of the top 10 applications is fairly stable from one month to the next. However there is one new entry in the top 10 for August. The Partiko mobile app has continued its strong rise over the summer and now breaks into the top 10 Steem applications for the first time. Ranking 7th highest by author numbers and 15th by payout amounts it slots into a group of three apps in position number 9.

Further down the chart we can see strong growth from Musing (up 6 places), Actifit (up 8 places) and Appics (up 13 places and into the top 25).

2. New Entries

There are three applications that are either new into the top 50 applications for the first time, or entirely new releases over August.

Oracle-D brings together external companies looking to spread the word about their projects and Steem's army of online content creators. The Steem community engage with the companies, learning about their products and ultimately producing content on behalf of these clients. The clients benefit from this content as well as the building of a new community and reward the creators using their investments in Steem Power. This is an application that is thinking a little wider as to the potential of the Steem blockchain.

Oracle-D went live at the end of June. You can read more about it here:
https://steemit.com/oracle-d/@oracle-d/introducing-the-oracle-d-platform-now-live

Steemgg is a game distribution platform allowing developers to upload their games and earn upvotes from gaming enthusiasts. It's early days but with more than 15 games already uploaded and their first game jam in the bag there's plenty to like about this newcomer.

Steemgg kicked-off at the start of August. You can read the official communication here:
https://steemit.com/steemgg/@steemgg/steemgg-the-world-s-first-blockchain-html5-gaming-platform-based-on-steem

Steem Snake only launched two weeks ago but it's already gathered 150 users and jumped into our top 50. It's the classic snake game but there's a chance of upvotes from the @steemsnake account if you gain enough points!

You can read more about Steem Snake here:
https://steemit.com/steemsnake/@fbslo/introducing-steem-snake-play-snake-and-earn-steem

3. Market share percentages of the largest applications

The "market share" of the Steem blockchain activity is presented below for the author and payout metrics. Only the highest-ranking applications are shown with all other apps combined into the "other" category. Note that this analysis has been updated to include comments as well as posts which explains the higher proportion in the "other" category in comparison to July.

The Steemit market share has reduced by around 5% from July 2018 as measured by author numbers and by around 3% when measured by post payout. These fluctuations are still fairly small and Steemit shows no signs of relinquishing its dominant position.

4. User growth for largest applications

Overall author numbers fell from July to August, with individual authors numbers down from 86,630 to 80,379 (-7.2%). Total author numbers measured across all apps (including double counting of users who post using more than one app) also fell (-8.1%).

This is the typical pattern when the Steem price falls since the blockchain rewards also reduce and the global level of interest in cryptocurrencies tends to fade. The August reduction in the Steem price was fairly severe, with a lowering of over 25% down to below $1.

The more established applications tend to move in line with this overall reduction in users and will no doubt bounce back if the crypto market turns bullish. In the meantime it is encouraging to see increasing adoption of some of the newer applications and the continual widening of the Steem ecosystem. Partiko, SteemPeak, Musing, Actifit, Ulogs and Appics all showed monthly growth in author numbers of 25% or more.

5. Application use per account

Following on from last month's study I've added in the data from August and plotted on a logarithmic scale for clarity.

The number of users that just use one application has risen from 76.5% in June to 78.9% in July and 80.5% in August. The vast majority of users still prefer to use one or two applications, or perhaps use alternative accounts for different applications.

6. Analysis of "other" posts and comments

The last row of the top table shows 589k posts and comments in the "other" category. This includes 69k from applications outside the top 50 table but also 520k from unallocated posts that are not classified by application; a sizeable number and a slight concern to the validity of the above analysis.

An analysis of these unclassified posts for 31 August uncovered three applications that were falling outside of the main analysis due to a different structure of json_metatdata. Of these, Parley would make the top 50 in position 27, with 127 users and $600 in post payout (over the whole of August) . This will be incorporated into the analysis next month.

The remaining posts and comments from 31 August are almost entirely from bots, spammers, or cleaning services. I have carried out a brief and broad analysis with the following results:

• Cleaners 23% (including badcontent 16%, cheetah 6%)
• Bots 54% (including steemitboard 25%, sadkitten 5%, photocontests 3%)
• Spammers 15% (lots of those 'Nice post' comments are automated)
• Others 8%

As such I am broadly satisfied that these "other" 520k comments do not invalidate the overall analysis.

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Tools and Scripts

Data was extracted from SteemSQL, an SQL resource run by @arcange.

For the August analysis I used the data process developed in July:

(i) SQL query data extraction: Queries were simplified to allow faster extraction of (more) data. This allowed analysis to be carried out on comments as well as posts.

(ii) Data processing using node.js and javascript: A completely new data processing script was written to clean and aggregate the data into the required format.

(iii) Graphics: Mac Numbers was employed for the comparisons and charts.

The scripts can be found in this repository:
https://github.com/miniature-tiger/MarketShareAnalysis

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Relevant Links and Resources

Links are provided in the text.

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Repository

https://github.com/steemit/steem

This analysis is of data from the Steem blockchain which is an open source project. Many of the individual applications are also open source projects in their own right.

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Thanks for reading!