Going Mainstream! One Million Accounts By Year End? Steemit vs. Bitcoin

in #steem8 years ago (edited)

Breaking Out Into The Mainstream?

SocialMediaBreakOut

Steemit traffic continues to climb. It's gone from nowhere to a traffic ranking of 8,799 in the US in just a few months. We can see an impressive growth trajectory so far. It's still very early, but it appears Steemit is poised for explosive growth.

AlexaRanking

Steemit vs. Bitcoin Content

It's interesting to compare the active interest in Bitcoin to Steemit using traffic numbers. Steemit dominates all the Bitcoin content websites below in bounce rates, daily pageviews and daily time on site. Steemit's traffic ranking in the US is second only to Coindesk. That's even more impressive because many of the Bitcoin websites have been around for years, yet in just a few months Steemit has surpassed most of them in the US.

ComparisonTable

Most of these websites have a narrow focus on Bitcoin and digital currencies, but that's precisely why Steemit has mainstream potential. People with varied interests and from all walks of life are gravitating towards Steemit to share their life and passions and to be rewarded for their contributions.

Steemit vs. Bitcoin Continued...


ComparisonTable

There's a lot of skepticism about Steemit as you can see here and here especially from Bitcoin 'maximalists' and those who might be worried that Steemit's success will undermine Bitcoin. If Bitcoin advocates rely on the idea that Bitcoin's first mover advantage and the network effect is the main competitive advantage of Bitcoin, then they should certainly pay attention to an ecosystem with the strongest growth trajectory. If anything Steemit can give Bitcoin much more exposure than it would have ever had.

Perhaps it's better to think of Steem Dollars as a convenient payment layer that complements Bitcoin. Bitcoin is undoubtedly one-of-a-kind and is often considered digital gold or a reserve currency that holds all the other blockchain ecosystems together in our digital world.

Bitcoin advocates that try to promote Bitcoin for payments and as money encounter the same obstacles gold bugs run into trying to promote gold as money. Will the average person want to spend gold or Bitcoin in today's economy? I see these assets as a safe haven. Store of value. An investment. Insurance. For now under Gresham's law 'good' money like Bitcoin or gold will be removed from circulation and 'bad' money will be used instead.

On the other hand Steem Dollars can be useful today as a medium of exchange because the dollar is already familiar to everyone around the world. They also can't be limited, frozen and don't require banks just like Bitcoin. With Steem dollars users won't incur the mental transaction costs of spending something entirely new and volatile like Bitcoin, especially when people have to count in Satoshis (ie. 0.000001 Bitcoins). But yes, yes. Bitcoiners and gold bugs are all waiting for that dollar apocalypse:

Apocalypse

But no one really can predict when and if that will happen. Perhaps you can ask a numerologist or get a tarot reading. In the meantime, it's probably a good idea not to count on a total collapse. Even if there were a hyperinflation, dollars may still end up being the monetary unit of account. A friend of mine remembers the days growing up in Vietnam when there was hyperinflation there. His mother invested in gold and his family made out extremely well relative to everyone else in the village. He felt rich because he was one of the few able to eat chicken every once a while while everyone else ate rice and noodles every day. His mother traded gold for tobacco or bags of rice, but the exchange for most goods & services were still made in Dong, the Vietnamese fiat money. It just took a lot more Dong to buy things. Finally there are huge differences between something being possible, something being probable and something being probable & imminent. Libertarians have been waiting for a collapse of our dollar since the 70's and I used to think like that not too long ago, but it's good to keep an open mind about the various possible scenarios of the future. Lastly the Steem ecosystem can change the target monetary asset from Dollars to Gold or Bitcoin in the future so there is some flexibility in the system.

Account Growth – One Million By Year End?

Lastly here is a chart on account growth from Steemle.com:

AccountGrowth

We can see the impressive trajectory and if we do some rough math we get One Million by year end if the growth rate continues along the slope!!!

[Calculations: If we extend out the growth linearly we have a slope of roughly 2000 accounts per 31 days or 64.5 in total account growth per day. There are 144 days until the end of the year so 2000 accounts/day +144 days x 64.5 accounts/day gives us an estimate of 11,288 accounts created per day by year end. If we take the average new accounts per day from now until year end to be (2,000+ 11,288)/2 we have an average of 6,644 new accounts per day until the rest of the year and an account total of 956,736 (6,644 x 144 days) by year end. We add that to the 50,000 accounts we currently have and that gets us just over one million by year end. BTW if the growth rate continues we can very well be close to 10 million by the end of 2017... but it's way too early to project that far ahead. I need some of the mathematicians here to confirm my projections here or perhaps someone who knows Vedic math.]

Remember the real growth rate will likely be choppy with ups and downs, surges and plateaus, but if the community and Steem team focuses on improving the user experience, on viral growth and gets some publicity, we should expect to get to one million users by year end. Some kind of referral system would turbocharge Steemit and will probably ensure we hit the mark. Of course with a referral system, the biggest challenge is to minimize sybil attacks and count only quality referrals. Fortunately Steemit can use stake and reputation as measures of quality.

Conclusion

It's still early, but the traffic & account growth remain on an impressive trajectory, and engagement remains incredibly high. Steemit dominates most Bitcoin content websites. If Steemit maintains it's trajectory for account creation we may see one million accounts by year end. It's still too early to project how fast Steemit can grow and there are still a lot of challenges that remain ahead before it becomes a household name. It'll probably be a roller coaster ride, but Steem could very well be the first cryptocurrency to make it mainstream and that should bring joy to anyone who's been involved in this space for a while. It would be great if everyone came together to help make it happen. Bright days are ahead...

Sunshine

Especially for all you libertarian and anarchist gloom and doomers...... =P

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Steemit will take over the world , cheers steemers :)

Are we not breaking 2 Billion anytime soon ? :DD

In spirit we may already have!

That's the spirit.

It really is great to be involved in something that is so young, when you know deep down that it's going to be huge! Steemit is going to completely change up the social media spectrum. I mean, Who the hell is going to post stuff on facebook when they're not even getting paid for it. This is only the beginning my friends :)

I kick myself every day when I post on liberty-hating fascist Facebook - it is like I am junkie and go back for more. So yes, I am happy Jeff Berwick shared STEEMIT with his list - may my addiction habit change from Facebook to here!

You're in a much better place now , plus you get paid to be here, It's win win :)

Hey I know you... welcome!


Steemit change the Internet!

Daily pageviews? In what units are these. Steemit has a huge advantage here.

It's the the average of how many different pages a user visits each day. Yes impressive.

Of course we do. We generate content that people consume in various subjects. These other sites are niche.

Note that Alexa rank is not linear when converted to page views, thus when comparing Reddit's global rank of 26 to Steemit's 17,563, the actual ratio in terms of page views is 1438, and not 17653 ÷ 26 = 679. For United States rank the ratio between the two w.r.t. to page views is 1033 which is closer to the 8799 ÷ 9 = 978 ratio of the ranks.

According to Alexa rank, we'd need 1000+ Steemits to match Reddit, but we'd also need 9 Reddits to match Facebook. But Google Trends seems to indicate that we'd need more than 9 Reddits to match Facebook (although the scale is not entirely clear). I read that Reddit has 234 million users and Facebook 1.71 billion, so that appears to be a ratio of 7.3.

So roughly as of now w.r.t. page views, we'd need 1000 Steemits to match Reddit and 10,000 to match Facebook.

But from steemd.com we can compute that roughly 85% of the signups are not active, so Steem has roughly 5000 - 10,000 users. So in terms of users, we'd need 20,000 - 40,000 copies of Steemit to match Reddit and 8 times that to match Facebook. This is because for now the Steemians are viewing many more pages than on Facebook. But this could be misleading for numerous reasons:

  • early adopters are more enthusiastic
  • activity on Facebook doesn't always reload the page, thus no page view incremented
  • Facebook has so many mobile app users who may not be counted in Alexa's stats; whereas, Steem is primarily accessed from Steemit.com as of now.

So it is far too early to conclude that Steem is on the way to world domination.

Also note that the projection of daily signups increasing is very speculative given the extremely high volatility on the chart. Also we don't know to what degree this is a proliferation of Sybil attack accounts and/or actual increase in real people signing up.

And afaik we don't have good data on the account abandonment rate of real people, since afaik we can't easily differentiate which accounts are Sybils and which are real people.

So we are really lacking the data to make a determination of how well or poorly Steem is doing in terms of adoption and viral spread.

Fair points. I haven't compared traffic rankings with Reddit/Facebook yet. I mean Reddit's been around for 11 years and FB 12 yrs. Growth, engagement and retention are vital so there is a lot of room for improvement. Probably a lot of FB/Reddit stats are inflated too. A lot of apps just use FB for login. Yes signups are choppy, but as long as we see higher highs and higher lows we can at least get some sense of growth. I agree these are just rough metrics. Great thing is the rough metrics already look very good and the team can probably easily improve conversions & retention by 50-100%. There is already organic growth so with a referral program I think we can ensure growth rates continue.

@smooth and I discussed daily and monthly unique users, which seems to indicate Facebook is 200,000 times larger at the moment, yet we both concur we are lacking data.

A lot of apps just use FB for login.

That is an interesting point. I wonder if that is included in Facebook daily and monthly user stats?

Probably. Lol. You have to take everything with a grain of salt even when FB touts numbers at shareholders meetings and on financial reports. A lot of grey area. I would say 20% of FB profiles are fake with major click farms and ad bot traffic. (Side note that's why you have to be careful registering new users on Steemit as well.) Artificial bot traffic is everywhere online. FB gets away with a lot. I remember this video about facebook ads. Reddit has a lot of bots too don't they? Anyways real good data is always hard to find.

I remember this video about facebook ads.

Thanks for sharing that. That may have implications on Steem's voting rewards algorithm.

1 million brother and sister. Hell the rocket chat wil go crazy!

Its great to be a part of the growth of a platform. Showing so much interest this early on is great to see. I am a miner and its usually great to watch the network grow (even though you mine less >< ) but its good to see the stability and trust grow with it. Great article!

Thx! I agree very positive signs. BTW It would be great to know what your experiences have been as a miner!

Nice article and I hope steemit may succeed at least as btc did some years ago.
May you help me to explain my friends the cryptocurrency community commenting on my last post https://steemit.com/bitcoin/@frick/bitcoin-the-world-currency-that-people-still-thinks-you-can-use-only-on-darkweb

The more members the more posts and hopefully more members to read our posts and not just come here to write and take the money out

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