Steem has been exploding lately in terms of users, posts, and value. How far could it go?

@dan recently requested that someone do some market research related to some other cryptocurrencies and how they compare with Steem (https://steemit.com/blockchain/@dan/how-many-active-users-do-bitcoin-ethereum-litecoin-and-ripple-have). I haven't seen any other posts related to this (although I could have easily missed them), and since I like chugging through data, I thought I would give my best attempt at finding helpful figures for Dan.

However, I don't want to just compare Steem to the cryptocurrencies that Dan recommended, I also want to compare Steem to various popular social media platforms to see how much potential there really is for growth (hint: it's a lot). I hope this is what you were looking for Dan, and I hope it encourages some people that there is a tremendous opportunity for Steem to grow. Current adoption and use are incredibly small compared to mainstream social media platforms.

Total number of active users:

This is very difficult to estimate, especially for the crypto currencies due to their pseudonymous nature. However, I'll make my best guesses. For Bitcoin I chose 1/5 of the total unique addresses with more than 0.001 Bitcoins. For Ethereum I chose 1/5 of total unique addresses. For Litecoin I choose 1/5 of total unique addresses with more than $1 worth of Litecoin. For Ripple I took 1/5 of total unique addresses listed on ripplecharts.com. For Steem I took the total active accounts in the last 7 days. These numbers seem to match fairly well with other estimates I've seen, and I would say they represent good orders of magnitude estimates.

Bitcoin: ~850,000 users
Ethereum: ~86,000 users
Litecoin: ~34,000 users
Ripple: ~40,000 users
Steem: ~6,000 users

For social media, estimates are made based upon monthly use by unique accounts.

Facebook: ~1.1 billion users
YouTube: ~1.0 billion users
Twitter: ~310 million users
LinkedIn: ~255 million users
Instagram: ~100 million users
Reddit: ~85 million users

Transactions per day:

These numbers should be fairly reliable, except I couldn't find any more specific data about YouTube usage.
Bitcoin: 160,000
Ethereum: 25,000
Litecoin: 5,000
Ripple: 600,000
Steem: 38,000 posts+replies+edits+transactions+votes

Facebook: 4.5 billion likes per day
YouTube: Hundreds of millions of hours of watching and billions of views
Twitter: 500 million tweets per day
LinkedIn: 400 million page views per day
Instagram: 70 million posts per day
Reddit: 273 million pageviews per day, 25 million votes per day

Growth Rates

Bitcoin: Transactions/day growing at about 5% per month for last 12 months
Ethereum: Transactions/day growing at about 17% per month for last 7 months
Litecoin: Transactions/day basically unchanged for last 12 months
Ripple: Transactions/day growing at about 8% per month for last 12 months
Steem: Exploding. Difficult to measure.

Facebook: Number of users growing 15% year over year
YouTube: Number of people watching videos growing 40% per year
Twitter: Number of tweets per day is remaining roughly constant
LinkedIn: Number of users is increasing about 6 million per month
Instagram: I couldn't find any useful metric for growth
Reddit: Pageviews per month have been roughly constant for past 12 months

Market Cap

Some of these cough steem cough keep changing while I'm writing this.... :)
Bitcoin: $10.5 billion
Ethereum: $857 million
Litecoin: $199 million
Ripple: $225 million
Steem: $202 million

Facebook: $337 billion
YouTube: $80 billion
Twitter: $12.6 billion
LinkedIn: $25.4 billion
Instagram: $37.0 billion
Reddit: $4.0 billion

Market Cap per User

Here we see an interesting phenomenon: market caps per user are much larger for each of the crypto currencies when compared to each of the largest social media platforms. I think one interpretation of this is simply that we all can still be considered early adopters. When adoption really takes off, the number of users will likely rise much more quickly (percentage-wise) than the market cap (though that will rise too).
Bitcoin: $12,500
Ethereum: $10,000
Litecoin: $5,700
Ripple: $5,600
Steem: $34,000

Facebook: $300
YouTube: $80
Twitter: $41
LinkedIn: $100
Instagram: $370
Reddit: $47

Anyway, I hope this data is informative for you and helps us all to keep the bigger picture in mind. The facts are simple: until now, massive, centralized corporations have largely controlled not only the issuance of money and the regulation thereof, but they have also controlled, regulated, and censored virtually every form of media (social or otherwise) that we interact with. Crypto is here to stay.

Steem is disruptive. And it's disrupting $1+ trillion markets.

Best,

Trogdor :)