Most of that 17M is not potential members. A big share is search engine crawlers and AI citation bots, plus images: roughly 10% of the traffic is just images (i.ecency.com / images.ecency.com) and those get pulled by search engines and by every other Hive frontend that embeds them, which inflates the count further. On top of that, some of it is API calls and content being read on other frontends or mobile app or directly in search results, by people who were never ours to onboard in the first place.

So comparing signups against 17M is misleading. The honest denominator is real human visits to the site itself, which is likely lesser numbers. And of the people we actually could onboard, our strict signup rules (VPN, Tor and other abuse checks) deliberately turn some away.

That is the balancing act. Hivewatchers and others would rather we drop free signups entirely, while many want us to onboard more people so the community and platform grow. We have tried to set this up responsibly, distributing creators' content as widely as possible without opening the door to abuse.

Sustaining this kind of traffic is not easy. We constantly improve the infrastructure, the website and the UX. Creating the right hooks to turn readers into members is a separate challenge altogether and one we are actively working on. Sharing as to give people some ideas on what infrastructure they are supporting.