STEEMIT 2017 Round UP – Analyzing the ‘Cryptocurrency' Category

Cryptocurrency became a very hot topic in 2017. With bitcoin rising to over $20K at one stage and the rise of ICO’s it’s not often that you don’t see a headline somewhere referencing Cryptocurrency.

Steemit has an active Cryptocurrency category and at the time of writing it is the 11th most popular category to post in on the Steemit platform.

Aim of Analysis

The aim of this analysis is to

1. Get an overview and record of the posts made to Cryptocurrency in 2017
2. Establish any growth of this category over 2017
3. Evulate the earnings of this category during 2017
4. Establish the 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 ('cryptocurrency')

This query will pull all of the Posts made during 2017 in the category Cryptocurrency. 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 103K posts were created in the Cryptocurrency category by 17.49K authors. These posts netted 1,471K votes and 297K comments and also generated a total SBD pay-out value of 245.37K.
The average number of monthly posts to Cryptocurrency is 8,571 and the median is 10,334. Since July there has been a steady increase in the number of monthly posts.

The visualisation above look at the SBD pay-outs. The bar chart shows the pay-outs over time. We can also see that 84% of posts earn between $1 and $50. Less than 1% of posts earned over $50. The table on the right shows the top preforming posts in Cryptocurrency for 2017.

Let’s take a look at some averages

17.49k authors produced on average 5.88 posts each to the cryptocurrency category. The total of these 5.8 posts earned SBD 14.03 with the average post earning 2.39 SBD. On average each post received 2.88 comments and 14.31 votes. The average vote value on posts in the cryptocurrency category was 0.17 SBD

We can also view these averages over the year of 2017, which shows a surprising peak in the average SBD per post on the 19th Feb. Further investigation shows that on this day, there was only 1 post to this category with a pay-out value of 48 SBD

If we view the same information over months instead of days

We can now see that the average SBD per post decreased from May to Nov, and then increased again in December.

Having a look at the authors that posted to the cryptocurrency 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 @aggroed
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

What is interesting about the last set of data is that @jrcornel 97 posts ( so only 0.1% of posts) earned 9.5% of the category’s post pay outs.

Finally I had a look at Google trends. First I looked at the search term Cryptocurrency

And then I looked at the search term Steemit

Both charts show an increase from May with a steep rise in December

Looks like from this that Steemit is ahead of the curve when it comes to posts on Cryptocurrency. The number of posts jumped from May to June on Steemit and then increased slowly from there. Whereas the number of searches on Google began to increase slowly from May to Nov and then increase very fast in December.

Now let’s take a quick look at the Price chart for Bitcoin in 2017

The Google trend chart for cryptocurrency looks very much like the Bitcoin price chart. I thought this would be interesting to share.

Conclusion

Cryptocurrency is about more than just Bitcoin and interest in this topic is growing both on Google and here on Steemit. It did not come as a surprise to me that authors began posting more on Cryptocurrency here on Steemit at the same time as the interest slowing began to grow on Google. After all Steemit is a cryptocurrency platform and many authors would have an interest in this topic. Sites that provide a lot of quality relevant content are more likely to show up in Googles search results, which increases exposure for that site. Let’s hope the content on Steemit is up to scratch.

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

---

Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

---