Steemit vs Medium vs Quora - Competitive analysis

Details

Although Steemit.com is touted as a social media site its main competitors are more realistically content farm sites like Medium and Quora. So today I'm going to compare these 3 sites and see how Steemit.com stacks up against it's competitors.

But more importantly I want to know if we are tracking in the right direction and if there is any room for improvement regarding the quality of content on Steemit.com

Outline

• 01 Domain Comparisons
• 02 Organic Traffic Analysis
• 03 Conclusion

Scope of Analysis

I'll be looking at standard web site metrics freely available from Alexa.com but will also dig deeper into the organic traffic flow Steemit.com receives, to identify any potential improvements to the way we populate content on the blockchain.

Tools

Most data is freely available on https://alexa.com and I'll also include more specific traffic data from https://ahrefs.com

Disclaimer: Traffic data is only an approximation based on similar results for like traffic rankings. I do not have access to the pure Steemit.com analytics data.

Results

Domain Comparisons

First we'll start with the Alexa Traffic rank for each domain.

Steemit.com

Medium.com

Quora.com

As you can see both Steemit and Medium are heading in the right direction and improving their traffic rank, whereas Quora has steadily lost traffic rank over a similar period of time. Possibly indicating Quora is becoming a less popular destination.
Steemit.com however has actually improved it's rank by 1135 places in the last 3 months.

Next, we can look at the regional data for each domain to discover where the web traffic is coming from.

Steemit.com

Medium.com

Quora.com

As we can see each domain has predominately a USA audience, with the next largest audience coming from South Korea (Steemit), Japan (Medium) and India (Quora).

But what's most interesting is Steemit and Medium have a more balanced audience once you remove USA from the equation which indicates they have more global reach.

The next metric we'll look at are some engagement metrics. These metrics are important to Google when determining search engine ranking.

Steemit.com

Medium.com

Quora.com

Here's my explanation of these metrics:-

Bounce Rate

This is an indication of the likelihood a visitor will arrive and leave the site almost immediately. With a lower bounce rate indicating they are more likely to hang around.

Page Views

The average amount of pages a visitor will traverse before leaving the site .

Time on Site

The average amount of time a visitor will spend on the site.

So we can see Steemit.com has better Bounce Rate, Pageviews and Time on Site metrics than it's closest competitors, although each value has declined over the last 3 months.

The final piece of Alexa data we'll look at is where these visitors were before visiting the respective sites.

Steemit.com

Medium.com

Quora.com

In each case we can can see Google forms a large portion of the upstream traffic for each site, with Steemit and Medium gaining traffic from Facebook as a secondary source of traffic. They then split directions with Steemit benefiting more from YouTube and surprisingly Medium is getting more traffic from Reddit.

Contrast this to Quora, which appears to be almost exclusively getting traffic from Google. This isn't an ideal position to be in as a Google algorithm change could impact the business quite dramatically overnight.

Also, I expect the Reddit traffic will increase over the next few months as sites like Utopian.io look to have more of a presence on the site with their own subreddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/utopianio/

All screensnaps to this point were sourced from https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo

Organic Traffic

Now as the upstream traffic is predominately from Google I'll take a closer look at this data for each of the domains.

This following data is sourced from https://ahrefs.com using my personal account.

So first here's an overview of each domain.

NB: These rankings are a reflection of the ahrefs database so may differ from the previous images.

Steemit.com

Medium.com

Quora.com

Now given Steemit is barely 2 years old, it's competing quite well against the older domains, with Medium being 5 years old and Quora 7 years old. It would be interesting to see a similar time line but I don't have access to retrospective data.

The other thing to note is the perceived value of the traffic that Steemit users have generated by writing data on the STEEM blockchain. Currently sitting at $1.2M per month which indicates the work we do indeed has a monetary value even if the price of STEEM went to zero.

Next we can have a closer look at the organic traffic for each domain and where that traffic originates from.

Steemit.com

Medium.com

Quora.com

As you can see Steemit has had a dramatic rise in organic traffic over the last month which could be due to the influx of new Steemians in December. Google values fresh content and it appears Steemit is being rewarded for it right now.

Whereas Medium has had solid growth over the last year, and Quora looks to be recovering from the earlier decline in organic traffic numbers. Remember Quora is susceptible to algorithm changes more that the others.

Now when you look at the organic traffic broken down by countries, this might be a reflection of the type of content that is being written and not necessarily a reflection of where the bulk of the Steemians are from.

For instance, if you write a lot of content specific to the USA you'd expect that content to appear more readily in USA search results more so than South Korean search results.

Finally, well have a look at the Keywords Position Heatmap. This heatmap is a graphical representation of the the quality of keywords you are ranking for.

Orange represents high volume and Light Blue lower volumes.

Steemit.com

Medium.com

Quora.com

Now a picture tells a thousand words, and these pictures literally sum up each domains position.

We can clearly see Steemit has a lot of keywords ranking around positions 20-40 and very little in the top 10, which is predominately where organic traffic comes from.

Nobody really goes past the first page in Google Search anymore.

Now Medium has a broad cross section of keyword rankings as it's almost solid orange across the whole heatmap.

And Quora is the most interesting of all, as the bulk of their keywords are ranked in the top 10 search results. Which would support their estimated traffic value of around $34M per month.

The good news is a few years ago the Quora Heatmap looked a lot like the Steemit one.

So that's all I have for today, but here's a BONUS if you've made it this far:-

Top 10 Search Results Driving Traffic to Steemit:-

Keyword	Estimated Traffic	URL
pocket morty recipes	49,824	https://steemit.com/pocket/@xameer/pocket-mortys-recipes-all-pocket-morty-crafting-recipes
hot	40,278	https://steemit.com/hot
steemit	34,025	https://steemit.com/
javhihi	12,254	https://steemit.com/@javhihi
8 ball pool hack	7,762	https://steemit.com/pool-8/@tinaclarkk35802/yes-get-free-coins-and-cash-in-8-ball-pool-hack-no-human-verification
free pokecoins	7,351	https://steemit.com/free/@xackcollins/yes-get-free-pokecoins-no-human-verification
bouncing boobs	7,332	https://steemit.com/fun/@juicyg/the-bouncing-boobs-collection
rubmaps	6,537	https://steemit.com/zappl/@overtthrow/rubmaps-com-rub-maps-alternatives-to-rubmaps
webster hubbell	5,508	https://steemit.com/clinton-foundation/@ronsheckelson/chelsea-clinton-s-real-father-is-webster-hubbell
how to buy ripple with USD	5,039	https://steemit.com/ripple/@thisjustin/how-to-buy-ripple-xrp-instantly-with-usd

NB: These results are combined from worldwide data so results may vary in your part of the world.

01 Domain Comparisons

We can see from the results above, that Steemit.com is more like Medium.com in both growth patterns and global audience reach. Whereas it's ahead of the pack in regards to the all important engagement metrics, albeit slowly coming back to the pack.

Also, it was surprising that the third most popular source of traffic for Steemit was from YouTube. This may have been due to the recent push by DTube to actively headhunt bigger YouTubers or could quite simply be a result of existing YouTubers already pushing the Steemit platform to their audiences.

Finally from this analysis we also discovered that Quora.com is mainly reliant on Google Traffic.

02 Organic Traffic Analysis

The difference in organic traffic volumes between the domains is probably due to the age of the domains and not necessarily the quality of content. We can see that Medium has the most balanced keyword spread amongst the three domains analysed, with Quora having the bulk of it's keywords appearing in the Top 10 search results.

Also, we can clearly see Steemit has had an organic traffic surge over the last month, which is likely due to the increased Steemit signups since December and as this hasn't plateaued yet, we can expect even more free traffic over the coming months.

03 Conclusions

It's clear Steemit.com is on the right track, but the quality of the 'Top 10 Search Results' driving traffic to the site is a little worrying, given number 1 is a fully plagiarised post and adult themes appear to fill a number of the other positions.

Although the numbers are very promising, as a few years back the Quora heatmap looked a lot like ours does today, so it could get really busy quickly around here given we already have a similar domain ranking to them.

All that said, Medium should be our focus because our profile already looks like theirs, so I suspect there is much to learn from that platform.

Perhaps the quality of Steemit posts needs to be looked at, as Medium posts tend to be rather verbose and read like short stories whereas Steemit ones sometimes look like they are the minimum words required to solicit upvotes.

A minimum word count of say 300 words before you can post could improve the quality of writing on the site, and would greatly improve our ability to move up the ranks. It might also help identify plagiarism quicker as the cheetah bot would have more words to analyse.

But I guess it depends on what Steemit Inc. wants this site to be.

And maybe the 2018 Roadmap will give us a better idea and maybe a little direction.

Thanks for reading!

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_{Main Image: Designed by @just2random
Domain Comparisons images derived from https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo
Organic Traffic Images derived from https://ahrefs.com}

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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