At the beginning of every month I was preparing a report containing details of new users for the previous month. In April we broke 1 million registered accounts. However, we have seen a downturn in the users registering, and an increase in bot and spam activity and I didn’t feel a monthly report was providing much value.
For that reason, I have changed to a report every second month, providing details of the two previous months.
If you missed the last report you can read it here
/@paulag/may-18-new-steemit-user-report-blockchain-business-intelligence
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
Repository
https://github.com/steemit/steem
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,'06/01/2018')AND created< CONVERT(datetime,'08/01/2018')Once I loaded the data into Power BI, I then carried out transformation and calculations using DAX language.
Overview
37,694 accounts registered in June and 34,180 in July. This is a 41% reduction on the number of accounts registered in April and May. The charts below show the number of new users registering each month this year. As we can see the trend a has been a negative trend.
In my last report under the conclusion I included the following
However what does concern me is that when looking at some of the new accounts, its obvious they are sudo names, many are scammers and bots. Some of which were set up by Steemit Inc. If I can spot these, why is steemit inc allowing them be set up??
Last month Steemit Inc made this announcement. I have no idea when it was implemented, however it could account for some of the reduced sign ups in June and July.
You can read that full post here
Almost 17% of new accounts completed their ‘about’ section in their profile, up from 15% in May. Just over 7.3% have added a link to an external reference, this was 6.5% in May.
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 41.32%, up from 35%. The % of accounts with 10+ posts was 17.61%.
We can see from the pie chart above, 58.68% of new accounts have not yet posted. 10.62% have made one post and 4.36% have made two posts.
These values for May were, 67.32% of new accounts had not yet posted. 7.28% have made one post and 3.9% have made two posts.
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.
New High Value SP Accounts
The table below shows the top Steemit Users based on Vesting Shares.
@tradetoken has about 153K SP and has delegated it to @top-exchanges. @top-exchanges seems to be curating posts under very specific tags and topics.
@Drslump has about 112K SP and is delegating to bidbots
A big big welcome to all the new users that registered with Steemit in June and July ’18.
Conclusion
The number of signups per month was at its lowest level this year in July. Although this drop in registration may be stark, I am confident Steemit.Inc have made changes for the positive.
We have seen a higher % of accounts completing their about section and we have seen a % of accounts with no posts at all. This could indicate a higher quality of user.
These reduced numbers in registration could also have an impact on retention or churn rates, however this is outside the scope of this analysis and will be covered in a separate post.