STEEMIT 2017 Round UP – Analyzing the ‘Blog’ Category

There are many categories available on Steemit under which you can publish a post. Consistently in the top 10 categories is Blog. Being such a popular category to post in, I felt it was important to document the data for this category in 2017

Categories are set by the 'Tags' you select when publishing a post. The first 'Tag' that you select is the Category the post will be recorded in. Once a post has been published on the Steemit platform, tags can be changed but the category will no change.

The aim of this analysis is to
Get an overview of the posts made to Blog in 2017
Look at the growth of this category over 2017
Look at the earnings of this category during 2017
Look at top authors of this category

The data and the query

I have connected to the Steemsql database held and managed by @ using Microsofts Power BI
The SQL query used for this exploration is

 Select *
 FROM comments (NOLOCK)
 where   
 ( created >= CONVERT(datetime,'01/01/2017')
 AND created< CONVERT(datetime,'01/01/2018')) and
 Depth = 0
And category  in ('blog')

This query will pull all of the Posts made during 2017 in the category Blog. It will ignore any comments and will also ignore tags. Just to point out, the first tag that is selected on a post is the category in which a post is recorded.

After this I carried out further transformations on the data using M. First with this piece of code I removed any columns I did not want

  = Table.SelectColumns(Source,{"author", "title", "body", "created", "children", "total_payout_value", 
  "net_votes", "pending_payout_value", "total_pending_payout_value"})

Then with this piece of code I changed the data type on the date field

 = Table.TransformColumnTypes(#"Removed Other Columns",{{"created", type date}})

After this I loaded the data into the model and proceeded to model the data using DAX calculations.

The Analysis

In 2017 38K posts were created in the Blog category by 7,467 authors. These posts netted 667K votes and 144K comments and also generated a total SBD pay-out value of 132.53K.

The average number of monthly posts to Blog is 3,159 and the median is 3,772. From May to Aug there was a steady increase in the number of posts per month, however this decreased for Sept and Oct, increasing again in Nov and Dec

The visualisation above look at the SBD pay-outs. The bar chart shows the pay-outs over time. We can also see that 24% of posts earn between $1 and $50. Less than 1.5% of posts earned over $50. The table on the right shows the top preforming posts in Blog for 2017.

Let’s take a look at some averages

7,469 authors produced on average 5.08 posts each to the Blog category. The total of these 5.08 posts earned SBD 17.75 with the average post earning 3.5 SBD. On average each post received 3.81 comments and 17.87 votes. The average vote value on posts in the Blog category was 0.20 SBD

For comparison the averages on the Cryptocurrency category are shown below

We can also view these averages over the year of 2017, which shows a surprising peak in the average SBD per post on the 5th June. Further investigation shows that on this day, there was a post to this category with a pay-out value of 14.5K SBD

If we view the same information over months instead of days

We can now see that the average SBD per post in May and June, and then increased again until another rise in December.

Having a look at the authors that posted to the Blog category, first I have sorted the data by the average number of comments per post

Comments are an awesome reflection on engagement within the post. Nice work @goldmatters with the high average number of comments.

I then sorted the data by the average number of votes per post

And finally I have sorted the data by the total SBD pay out value on posts to cryptocurrency by author

Conclusion

We can see clearly that posts on average in the Blog category tend to do better in terms of votes, payouts and comments than posts made in the cryptocurrency category.

You can find a full analysis of the cryptocurrency category here
https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@paulag/steemit-2017-round-up-analyzing-the-cryptocurrency-tag

On saying that, this analysis does not take into consideration the quality of the post, however I do class comments as a good indicator of engagement. I am hopeful that the more quality the post, the more comments.

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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