Why am I consolidating this list:

As a new Steemian, it's a little overwhelming to find the rich and diverse content available on Steemit.com platform. And since I intend to make some nice money with the least time, I feel it would be good to keep my focus on those topics that:

1. I feel I can deliver good content
2. I feel the passion to drive me through the painful stage of minnow
3. I have the interest to do a deep dive

That is why I've created a simple tool with Google Sheets to gain some clarity on how I should start this journey. I has definitely helped me and I hope that this tool will be useful to you also.

All data are collected from the public access available on Steemit:
https://steemit.com/tags

How you can get this analytics tool.

You can access the Google Sheet that I've shared publicly at:
https://goo.gl/cDeQQq

I have set it up for viewing permissions only, but you can make a copy to your your own Google Drive. After opening, just click on File >> Make a Copy  and save it. It's that easy.

After that you can use it freely .. .. you can update it yourself whenever you want to .. and even modify it to suit your needs.

How you can use this analytics tool.

The first sheet is very self explanatory. It's the overall statistics from these set of data

The 2nd sheet is where the action is.

These are a simple explanation of the fields

• Tag: The tag that is used
• Posts: The total number of posts belonging to this tag
• Comments: The total number of comments belonging this tag
• Payouts: The total amount paid out in SBD for posts with this tag
• Payout/Post: The simple average payout for each post in this tag. (Profitability)
• Comm/Post: The simple average number of comments for each post in this tag (Engagement)
• Pay/Comm: A ratio of payout each post has as compared to the comments it gets
• Rel Pay/Post: The profitability compared to overall average.
  More than 1 means this tag is getting more payout than average
  Rel Comm/Post
  More than 1 means this tag is getting more comments than average

Now the next 3 columns are where you need to fill up yourself

1. Skill: These are tags that you think you can contribute to
2. Passion: These are topics that you are passionate enough work on when there may seem to be no significant gains.
3. Interest: These are tags that you have the interest to explore deeper.

I will only focus on those tags that I have "yes" in ALL 3 criteria!

You may not need to go through all the 249 tags. I've already gotten enough clarity by going through just about half of it. The most important thing to note is that you have to 100% honest with yourself! Do not try bend reality just because you are afraid of missing out on high profitable tags. As time go by, your interest, your skills or even passion may change. So just start with what you have, what you love at this very current moment.

You may also use other criteria that you prefer. Maybe even add in one to tie to the niche of your blog or other social media accounts so that you can cross post your content.

After you are done, just filter the list by using the filter feature.

Follow these few simple steps:

1. Click on the down arrow icon to drop down the filter menu
2. Uncheck everything else that is not "1" (or "yes" depending on what you used)
3. Repeat it for all the columns
4. Now you will be seeing those tags that matches your all chosen criteria

Hopefully, now you've gained a better focus.

Please comment below if you have any feeddbacks :)

If you find this useful, please be generous with your Upvotes and Resteem :)

The limitations of this analysis:

While this tool may be really useful .. I would still like to point out that there still some limitations. Just keep this in mind for now and don't let it hamper your progress. You will gain better insights as you journey along.

1) These data only present the "supply-side" of the equation.

As tags indicates the number posts that are being supplied into the ecosystem, it is  not direct representation of how many people are interested in such a topic. We can only guess that if a tag generates a higher payout-per-post, it SHOULD mean that more people like it.

2) Limited Tags

The openly and readily available data is limited to only 249 tags at currently.

It is assumed that these are the most popular tags. Whether there other lesser known tags that are equally popular, or some hidden gems, that will take a lot exploring to find out

3) These data presents only a very high level, macro view

As these data are derived direct from only the 

1. total posts
2. total payout
3. total comment

We are actually missing out on lot of information, for example:

• Are the votes paid or organic
• Are there many votes from minnows or just a few votes from whales
• Are there from an influx of some upvote for upvote schemes
• Are there some contests going on that causes a surge in upvotes
• etc

4) It doesn't tell a trend .. at least not yet

As this is my first post, the data presented on shows the consolidated data from the start of Steemit till up. Have some Steem Tags lost it's steam? It will need some time to tell.

Note:

If you are diligent, and familiar with working on spreadsheets (Microsoft Excel/Google Sheets), you can extract the data from  @maverickfoo who has done an excellent job in painstakingly documenting the stats for a long while.

5) Multiple tagging

Since every posts can be tagged with multiple tags, it is hard to tell if it's popularity is from it being a secondary tag or the primary tag (which almost acts like a category instead).

Also, could the profitability of some tags have been diluted to unscrupulous tag spamming, it is difficult to tell.

6) Reserved and Privileged Tags

There are some tags  like the witness-category. While this is a high profitable tag, not many of us are going to have much good content to contribute to.

7) Other unknowns

Perhaps it's my ignorance, or perhaps some algorithms/parameters are not publicly made know, there will still be a bunch of unknowns. Very much like how Google's SEO algorithm is still very much guess work.