In light of our persistent dearth of new users, are there parts of the world where Hive performs better in onboarding, where we could potentially grow more easily than elsewhere?
Since the split with Steem, there have been 1,107,037 new user accounts created. 85,335 eventually made a post or comment, or 7.7%. Of those, 33,195 (39%) have location data set in their profile.
The majority of users don't set location data, and even among those who do, most are meaningless for location or not identifiable to me. Below I have split all these users based on the data in their location profile.
Unidentifiables includes locations like "Hive", "Blockchain", "The World" etc. but also those locations which were too infrequent for me to include in my query lest I manually search thousands of values.
Here is a chart that shows those populations over time, only counting those that became active within 30 days of joining.
Finally let's look at where new users come from.
As we can see, South America is almost always where we get most of our new users, followed often closely by Asia. As you're likely aware, Venezuela dominates ahead of all countries, but Argentina, Colombia and Brazil also contribute a good portion of new users.
The vast majority of North American and European users we have on Hive today are likely long-time holdouts from before the fork from Steem. Outside of longtimers, our userbase today appears to be almost all South American and Asian.
Note the recent spike in new South American users in late 2023.
There are huge differences regionally in how well we hold on to our new users as well. Let's compare our highest retention region with our lowest retention region. This metric compares how many new users are still posting in the second 30 day window to the first*.
Not only does South America contribute by far the most new users, the difference in how likely they are to stay is massive. A new North American user is about 30% likely to continue posting into the second month. That's 60% for a new South American user.
Note the collapse in South American retention in late 2023. This is actually the reason I wanted to make this post, we can see how it coincided with the spike in new users seen before. In late 2023 we had a major spike in new users from Venezuela, however their retention was extremely low.
This demonstrates that spending resources to draw in users is unlikely to be worthwhile, because retention can be very poor. The spike had pretty much no impact on user activity overall in the end. Hive has core problems that need to be resolved before we should spend substantial resources on attracting new users.
Finally here is the chart with the brand new user retention rates for all regions except Oceania (numbers are too small so retention rates are all over the place).
* ie. how many people post between 30 to 60 days after creating an account compared to the first 30 days.
