Steemit’s skyrocketing Alexa rank on the road to world domination

Steemit.com’s skyrocketing Alexa rank appears to be quite impressive.

Similarly its skyrocketing Google search popularity.

Knock, knock, Ello are you still there?

Yet so was Ello’s skyrocketing launch, until it wasn’t impressive any more.

At its peak, Ello had 100,000 signups daily and up to 30,000 signups per hour, which is approximately 100 times more than Steem has now.

Zooming in shows the first peak, pullback, final peak, and one last gasp a month later:

And today Ello is back down to about where Steemit is now at its inception.

Steem is not Ello nor goodbye?

Of course Steem has some significant differences from Ello. In the minds of the masses, the most prominent difference of Steemit has to be the concept of earning money from blogging. The masses aren’t apt to consider blockchain and crypto-currency technology as a compelling reason to try Steemit. The masses might value the concept that their content production is not owned by any corporate behemoth, i.e. the “anti-Facebook”, which is also what Ello was offering. And they are most likely to associate this with the profits on their content being paid to them rather than to a corporate owner, which is again tied to the concept of earning money from blogging. It is unlikely that the masses will view the blockchain and crypto-currency as important in their priorities here and now. Maybe one day in the future, but our analysis is about what happens this year, not 5 - 10 years from now because the success or failure of Steem will likely be determined over the next months or year or so. Note others might argue that that Steem can slowly improve over many years, yet I would argue that if that is the case then competitors will proliferate. For Steem to slamdunk, it needs to widen its lead pronto with its first-mover advantage.

Where’s the beef?

I have shown some computations that very roughly estimate the attrition (abandonment) rate of Steem to be greater than 80% (and perhaps as high as 94%) of signups. Some claim that many signups might not be real people, but rather attempts to Sybil attack given the monetary gains possible with Steem. Yet I’ve cited numerous anecdotal cases of Steem accounts for real people that appear to have not returned to Steemit in the past week and whose earnings and interaction on the site appears to have been insufficient to sustain their participation.

So although it is not yet clear if Steemit’s reward system and feature set are sufficient to retain and grow usership, certainly this can be a call to action in terms of monitoring these metrics and doing our best to improve on the features that will retain users and hopefully spreading a viral enthusiasm.

Small dogs are cute, but...

Putting the scale into perspective, shows how highly speculative it is to project exponential growth from the first months.