How Many Active Users Are Really On Steemit?

I have seen a few random charts on active users currently on Steemit, but the data is hard to find and doesn't look right. It is subjective because each person may define an active user differently. And, as accounts age the active user percentage would change...I would guess it would slowly drop off. The purpose of this post is to show you the actual data for active users and what that drop off is.

What Is An Active User

This is just the definition I used, it's not something that is set in stone.

• Account must have posted at least 5 times in the life of the account. This can be comments as well.
• Account must have posted at least once in the past 2 months.

This part is subjective, but I think I was pretty lenient in this definition. The idea was just to try and eliminate accounts that never use the platform, bots people may use to upvote their stuff, etc.

Each column represents the month when the account was created.

• July looks low because the month isn't even half way finished.
• Looks like there was a lot of total account growth last summer, this summer looks even bigger!
• The number of active accounts look like it's spiking like crazy.

This chart shows the total active users over time. This chart is showing that the number of active users has quadrupled in the past 3 months to a total of 38k as of July 13th, 2017.

Here is the same data, but this chart shows active users that signed up per month.

This chart is probably similar to what you may have seen floating around Steemit. I don't believe this chart, because my thinking was that as you progress in time, active users drop off. For example, a user that signed up on Steemit in June and is active today, may not be active 2 to 3 months from now. There has to be a natural drop off.

To find that out, I took snapshots of Steemit data every month for about the past year on the 13 of each month to see the active user trends.

• The orange rows represent the month in which the account was created.
• The blue columns represent the number of accounts that are active, inactive, and total for that particular month in which the account was created as of July 13th, 2017.
• The green columns show the date at which I'm measuring account activity (1 post 2 months prior to that date). The percentage shows how many accounts are active from that particular account creation month.
  • For example: 29% (one of the cells highlighted in yellow) shows that 29% of the accounts created in June 2017 are active as of July 13th, 2017.
  • Another example: 3.2% (one of the cells highlighted in yellow) shows that 3.2% of accounts created in September 2016 are active as of July 13th, 2017.
  • Last example: 8.5% (one of the cells highlighted in yellow) shows that 8.5% of accounts created in September 2016 were active on October 13, 2016.

In the last 2 examples, the number of active users for the accounts created in September 2016 decreased from 8.5% active to 3.2% active today. This means some people stopped being active over those months...or maybe the accounts were setup for some other purpose besides posting.

It may be a little confusing, but you can see the percentages for each row decrease as you scroll to the left. Let's look at this graphically.

• Each line represents active users from a particular signup month.
• The Y axis is the number of active users for each signup month over time
• The dates along the X axis is the snapshot at which I'm measuring active users.

Look at the light blue line (the line all the way at the top). This represents the number of active users that signed up on Steemit in July 2016. Over time, the number of active users that signed up in July 2016 has dropped from about 3,800 down to about 1,600. Each line is dropping off over time. Each line seems to be shrinking to about 1/3 of the original height over time.

This is the first chart I showed you, but hopefully it looks different to you now.

Each of the blue bars (active users) from recent months will shrink over time. The 18.5k active users that signed up in June may shrink down to 7k over time...same for July and May, etc.

This means that the 38k active user count as of today is inflated. What's the real number? Maybe it's closer to 20k if previous ratios hold up in the future. Time will tell, but let's assume for a second my 20k active users is correct. That means about 8% of total users are active. 8% is pretty good!

What is also really promising for Steemit is the number of total users signing up has grown significantly...there is no subjectivity in that!

If you read through all of that and didn't fall asleep, then you are as big a nerd as I am. Congrats!

All of this data was pulled using SteemSQL, please see posts from Hive account@arcange to read more about SteemSQL.