At the beginning of every month I prepare a report containing details of new users for the previous month. I normally post this in the first 2 days of the month, but setting up the witness server has me a little behind. So delighted to be getting back to some data.

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

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,'03/01/2018')
AND created< CONVERT(datetime,'04/01/2018')

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

If you missed the full February ‘18’s report you can check it out here
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/february-18-new-steemit-user-report-blockchain-business-intelligence

Overview

Feb ‘18 Overview

March ‘18 Overview

March seems to be another bumper month for new user registration. Jan 18 seen 159K new uses, Feb dropped to 73k and March jumped back up to 126K new users. That is an increase of 72% on February. It is worth keeping in mind that February only has 28 days, however the level of drop seen in Feb was greater than the average number of days new user registrations. It’s really good to see the number back up to about 100K new users a month.

In March ’17 there were 8,348 new account. March ’18 is therefore up 1409 % on the same period last year.

Just over 12% of new accounts completed their ‘about’ section in their profile and almost 6% have added a link to an external reference. Both of these values are down this month. In February 17% of new accounts added details to their about section. 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 disappointing to see these values drop.

Posting Activity

The % of new accounts with posts was 31.8% down from 43.77%. I am not surprised with this as there seems to be a larger % of lessor quality accounts as mentioned above. The % of accounts with 10+ posts is 13.6%, again this value is down on previous months and I hope we see a rebound soon.

We can see from the pie chart above, 68.2%% of new accounts have not yet posted. 7.48% have made one post and 3.69% have made two posts. Looking at February values, March results are a little disappointing.

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.

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

I must add that I have not checked the integrity of 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. However it is also not unheard of for account to produce multiple good quality posts or comments a day.

New High Value SP Accounts set up in March

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

@madpuppy has about 170K SP. Both the recovery account and the witness proxy on this account is set to @grumpycat

@blockways has about 70K SP, most of which has been delegated for a fee.

@notar has about 50K SP, most of which has been delegated to @booster

@powerbank has about 50K SP also delegated to @booster

A big big welcome to all the new users that registered with Steemit in March ’18. If you did join in Macrh ’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-march-17-then

Conclusion

Marchs was an awesome month in terms of the number of new accounts registered on Steemit. However the report does not stop there and although the number of accounts was high, other stats are not so positive.

The quality of the new users seems to be below that of previous months and this is back up with the lower % actually making any post at all.

It is also disappointing to see the new accounts with the high SP are here to invest in bots. I wonder to myself are these really new accounts or are people trying to hid the fact they are investing in bots and using different accounts to do so with?

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...

You can find #BlockchainBI on discord https://discordapp.com/invite/JN7Yv7j

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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