Steemit Churn Rates Q1 2018
Churn is a fact of life in business. You will win new users and you will lose users. Churn can be calculated by the following formula
Churn = Number of Active users at the beginning of the period + New registrations – Number of Active users at the end of the period.
Churn rate can be calculated using
Churn rate = Churn / Number of Active users at the beginning of the period
“While churn is not necessarily a bad thing for all businesses, a high churn rate compared to your competitors can be a troubling sign. For social media and advertising platforms, it can suggest a lack of engagement and loyalty among the user base – and increased consumer dissatisfaction with the platform at large. Especially for companies that rely on advertising revenue, the lack of a consistent, engaged audience could jeopardize key business models and monetization strategies.”
Source https://www.vertoanalytics.com/chart-week-social-media-networks-churn/
The aim of this analysis is to calculate the churn rate on Steemit. I have seen the question being asked a number of times now in different comments on posts, and most recently I had a direct request from @davemccoy for this information.
Repository
https://github.com/steemit/condenser
All data for this analysis was taken from Steemsql held and managed by @arcange. As to not distract from the data, I will first present the findings and then the queries used.
Weekly Churn Rates 2018
The chart below shows the weekly churn rate by line and by bar you can see the number of new accounts and the distinct user count for the week.
The table above shows the number of new accounts registered per week, the distinct count of votes, the discount of authors, the distinct user count (either voted or posted/commented), the weekly churn and the weekly churn rate.
The churn rate varies considerably from week to week as it is dependent on two variables, the distinct users and the number of new accounts. As both of these can vary from week to week it is expected to see this variation reflected in the churn rates.
The average weekly churn rate is 22% and the median is 20%
Monthly Churn 2018
As with the weekly churn rates you would expect to see a variance on the monthly churn rates as the variable also change. There are notable swings on the number of new accounts each month. However the distinct user is smoother when looked at monthly over weekly. This smoothness in the distinct user reduces the swings on the churn rates
Both the average and the median monthly churn rates are 59%
Q1 2018 Churn rate
In Q1 of 2018 Steemit lost more active users than gained. The churn rate was 121%
Using this as a comparative figure against the social media sites in the image above. Facebook was reporting a churn rate Q3 to Q4 of only 2.8%, Snapchat 23.5%, Instagram 19.1%, Twitter 25.3% and Kick 33%. I was unable to source more recent data and I was also unable to source churn rates for Reddit. If you do have this information, please do comment below as it would add value to this post.
Specific Turn Rates
In @davemccoy request he defined the
"active users" as those members that post or comment in the preceding 2 week period of time
Calculating churn rates this was results in a higher monthly churn, with January showing that Steemit lost more active users than gained. Both the average and the median month churn rates are 79% in 2018
Conclusion
Churn is a fact of any business. What is an acceptable level of churn is also a business choice but the reality is, the lower this number the better. Calculating monthly churn in both ways as above show that Steemit has a monthly churn of between 59% and 79%. However a Q1 turn rate of 121% is very disappointing to see.
What are your thoughts on the churn rates above? What reflection do they give about Steemit? Please do comment below
The Queries
As mentioned I used Steemsql and PowerBI to gather and model the data. The query used to get the unique voters was
SELECT voter, timestamp FROM Txvotes (NOLOCK) where timestamp >= CONVERT(DATE,'2017-10-01') and timestamp< CONVERT(DATE,'2018-05-01')The query used to get the unique authors was
SELECT author, timestamp FROM Txcomments (NOLOCK) where timestamp >= CONVERT(DATE,'2017-01-01') and timestamp< CONVERT(DATE,'2018-05-01')To get the total unique users, I combined both of the above queries and then ran distinct counts on the name.
The query used to get the number of new accounts was
Select name, created FROM Accounts (NOLOCK) 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 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
Interesting to learn about Churn rate since I never heard of it before. Facebook still on the top lead due to their optimization on a user-friendly interface. I still use it for social media and friends network.
What's more, concern me is about Steemit Churn rate. The fluctuation rewards based on the STEEM and SBD market price is unstable. Meanwhile, new user lost interest in the platform over time.
what you say @legendchew is true.
I agree it is true
looks steemit getting increasing , I think one problem to be improved is about accepting new users instantly. it's so late to get feedback from steemit when apply as new user..
people have trouble getting traction on steem unless they have very specific interests or are very determined. it's not a mass media site as is
you are right, it is not a mass media site, and it is not a social media site and it is not just a blogging site. As long as it is not anything then people will be confused and leave.
Thank you for looking into this, this gave me an insight and better decide if this platform was really meant to be a social platform. Although to some degree, it does act like it, but for me, Steem was originally meant to be for content discovery. Perhaps it's a cross between the two - blogging and social. Perhaps data from blogging platform can provide better insights.
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good suggestion, like WP or Pulse or something
Hey @paulag!
Is there way to gauge how many of the new accounts are actually legitimate new users vs. placeholders/spam/bot accounts?
Almost every day 2 … 4 accounts with reputation 25 follow me. All they do us post links from YouTube. I fear there are quite a few of those.
Not just quite a few. A LOT. As part of the @steemflagrewards crew, we see many low effort spam accounts like those. The best we could do is to make sure their earnings stay in the dust level as the VP allows.
hahah I wish!
Thanks, this supports my thesis that Steemit needs a complete overhaul in how the Reward Pool works.
Few players gaming the pool, newbies get discouraged and go away. Assuming of course, that a majority of the new accounts aren't bots.
My other theory is there are more bots than people, but that is hard to sift from the data.
to hard. I would love a bot free day on steemit, just to collect the data
Interesting piece of analysis @paulag; Steemit's high churn rate is sad but not entirely surprising.
Now that "it" has been established, perhaps we should look at the reasons "why."
I would submit that the vast majority of Steemit's churn problem can be attributed to "misguided" marketing. If the primary angle of approach-- when anyone from STINC to individuals talk about the site — is "come to Steemnit and make money" you're going to have an ENORMOUS number of disappointed people.
ESPECIALLY if the statement "Come to Steemit and make money" is paired with someone pointing to Jeff Berwick or Jerry Banfield as "examples" of what that means.
It become about the "fantasies" and "magical thinking" people create in their own minds... "Oh, I can go write a few blog posts and post memes and make HUNDREDS of dollars a week!"
No. No you can't. At least not unless you're importing your existing 800,000 followers from YouTube or Facebook. And even then there's a burn in period.
I think it's time a LOT of people took a long hard look in the mirror! You can't go around being all distressed that most people seem to be here just to "milk the system for money" if you keep telling the world "come to Steemit to make money!" Think about it...
"But people wouldn't come if we didn't promise them money!"
Are you sure? Or would it just be the "get rich quick crowd" that would no longer come? And do we really want them, anyway, given the current issues we are dealing with?
But that's a whole different story, for a different post.
=^..^=
But without that promise Steemit is just another free speech blogging side like Minds or GAB. But both Minds and GAB offer more engagement in form of comments and upvotes.
Not even then because you would have 800,000 follower with 15 Steem Power / 30000 VEST. Do you know how many upvotes form a 30000 VEST account your need to get above the dust level?
I don't either but it's more then 7.
Steemit might already have to many of those as is already doomed.
I fully agree on a personal view point - however having experienced jerry on other platforms before steemit existed, he does not exactly bring quality traffic or users, but at an early growth stage for steemit, it helps with rankings and visibility to more mainstream people. but yes, a different story for a different post. Ping me if you write one, would love to chime in
Two weeks seems very limited for active users. Most platforms use ‘active within 30 days’ (Facebook and Twitter for example), several even use ‘active within 90 days’ to determine what is an active user.
Also this calculation forgets about won back users.
David Pakman, VC at Venrock and then some, has a good article on churn here.
I think it is normal that Steemit has a higher churn rate because currently the platform still promises lots but doesn’t tell people how hard it is to actually earn.
What would be interesting to see would be (monthly) rate churn based on account age. Where possible younger than one month, 1-3 months, 3-6 months, 6-9 months, 9-12 months, 1-2 years,+2 years old accounts. This would allow initiatives suc as @curie, @ocd, @cervantes, and others to device new strategies to improve user retention and thus lower churn.
Addendum: while retention on Steem can definitely be improved, and should IMHO, I don’t think looking at churn at this stage of the platform matters much.
Steem is merely two years old, all platforms still sport Beta. User acquisition and active user growth matters most. Improving the sign up process is still of a higher priority than the raw churn rate.
Churn rate baaed account age, reputation, and amount of posts/comments is a very interesting analysis though as it will facilitate improving retention.
Pure churn rate for a still beta platform without subscription model and never IPO’ed? Rather irrelevant right now.
Active users is still the most important metric but yes, both numbers go hand in hand. :)
Steem might be only two years old but I fear that most if not all the whales have been created. Only two years old, not out of beta and already jammed.
In addiction to the churn rate I suggest to look at how many user “level up” from plankton ⇒ minnows ⇒ dolphins ⇒ orcas ⇒ whales.
Just wait til HF20, when it doesn't take weeks to create a new account through the normal "free" channel.. the churn rate will explode, as will bots...
What change will HF20 bring which will enable this?
HF20 aims to simplify the account creation model.
^ what she said 🙂
More accounts to be abandoned later won't help the churn rate.
I recently registered two of my young children's names.
They won't be old enough to use them for another decade but I wanted to reserve the names and give them accounts in the first million.
They've never been active. Would this behavior inflate that churn rate?
I was thinking of doing the same myself
Post for them! (Yes, it would inflate the churn rate)
I've also created user names for projects that I have not posted for yet.