At the beginning of every month I prepare a report containing details of new users for the previous month. I have been taking a little break from Steemit but I couldn’t resist looking at this report as we are so close to 1 million users
Aim of Analysis
The aim of this analysis is:
• Establish how many new users registered
• Establish what % of accounts have posts
• Find out who are the new big players in terms of SP
• See what accounts are acting suspiciously
• Establish if there is a break in any of the trends from previous periods
The Data-source and Query
As always to produce this report I connect to Steemsql (paid subscription services held and managed by @arcange ) with Power BI. The SQL query used to gather the data for this report was
Select *
FROM Accounts (NOLOCK)
where
( created >= CONVERT(datetime,'04/01/2018')
AND created< CONVERT(datetime,'05/01/2018')
Once I loaded the data into Power BI, I then carried out transformation and calculations using DAX language.
If you missed the full March ‘18’s report you can check it out here:
@paulag/march-18-new-steemit-user-report-blockchain-business-intelligence
Overview
March ‘18 Overview
April ’18 Overview
April was the slowest month this year in terms of new user registrations. Jan 18 seen 159K new uses, Feb dropped to 73k and March jumped back up to 126K new user, and now April is down to 62K. That is an decrease of 50% on March.
In April ’17 there were 7,754 new account. April ’18 is therefore up 700 % on the same period last year.
Just over 13.4% of new accounts completed their ‘about’ section in their profile and almost 7% have added a link to an external reference. Both of these values are up this month.
In March 12.6% of new accounts added details to their about section. Why are these values of importance? Well I use these to assess potential the quality of the user. If they have come to Steemit to browse then chances are they may not complete these fields. However if they are experienced bloggers or have experience in social media marketing, then they know the importance of competing this information.
It has also been proven with other analysis, this metric for measuring the quality of the new user relates most to retention levels. It is therefore good to see even a small rise in these values
Posting Activity
The % of new accounts with posts was 32.7% down from 31.8%. I am not surprised with this as there seems to be a slightly smaller % of lessor quality accounts as mentioned above. The % of accounts with 10+ posts is 13.9% which is consistent with last month.
We can see from the pie chart above, 67.32% of new accounts have not yet posted. 7.28% have made one post and 3.9% have made two posts. Looking at March values, April results are rather consistent.
Strange Activity
There are very very few extraordinary accounts on Steemit that can push out multiple posts a day of high quality. From discussion with other experienced steemain and whales, account producing large volumes of comments or posts could very well be bots, scammers or plagiarists and the activity is deemed suspicious till otherwise cleared up. Not all accounts that produce numerous comments a day are scam or bots or low quality but these are in minority.
Below are the new accounts from April that have suspicious activity. Tagging @steemcleaners and @cheetah to cross reference.
I must add that I have not checked the integrity of all these accounts or posts, I struggle to get 1 data post done a day and I know from talking with writers, good form content can take a number of hours to write and post. Some of the names on this list make me cringe such as @followbackbot, @twitter.news @recommendbot. It’s also good to see that some of these accounts have already been flagged. However it is also not unheard of for account to produce multiple good quality posts or comments a day.
New High Value SP Accounts set up in March
The table below shows the new Steemit Users sorted by Vesting Shares.
@jaggerfinkleman has about 272K SP. This SP has been leased to @therising
@patipati has about 80K SP and is it not leased out. The recover account is set to @ds1tle
@printingpress has about 56K SP, most of which has been delegated out
@goodnewworld has about 49K SP and is not currently delegating.
A big big welcome to all the new users that registered with Steemit in April ’18. If you did join in April ’18 you might be interested in seeing how those are doing after a year on Steemit. You can read that report here
@paulag/if-you-joined-steemit-in-april-2017-then-oh-and-happy-steemit-birthday
Conclusion
April was a slower month in terms of new user registrations. However the report does not stop there and although the number of accounts was high, other stats are not so positive.
The quality of the new users remains low and this is backed up with the lower % actually making any post at all.
Looking at the accounts with suspicious activity. I see an account there I am familiar with @introduce.bot, which is also on the high SP list. This bot is up voting posts in the introduction tag and also leaving a comment and has been back with some SP to do so. The bot has good intentions and really calls back to the same old question, what is spam? I am in favour of helping out newbies and the intentions I like, but is more and more of steemit just bots?? This is something I have struggled with for a long time, less humans more bots. But someone has gone to the bother to set up this bot and fund it so newbies get a little vote. I’m really on the fence with my feelings on this one. I am anti bot but pro good intentions.
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...
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