Dear steemians,
As a statistician working in the finance sector (insurance) I just tried to evaluate the current market capitalization of steemit.
IMHO the value of a social network is, most of all, a function of its user base ("network effect"). Based on this assumption I made some calculations.
Steemit has currently a user base of ca. 184'000 (last value from https://steemd.com/distribution) and a market cap of 526.9 Mio. $.
(I disregard the 9.5% of inflation because 75% of this inflation goes to authors and curators and the inflation rate is reducing by approximately 0.5% per year
(https://steemit.com/steem/@steemitblog/final-review-of-steem-economic-changes).)
Facebook has a user base of 1.94 billion and a market valuation of 433.71 billion $ (as of 13th June 2017).
From this you can calculate that Facebook has a number of users 10'543 times that of steemit, but a market valuation of just 823 times that of steemit.
In other words one user has a value of 2'864$ for the stakeholders of steemit (that is us!), but a value of 224$ for the shareholders of Facebook.
To justify the current market cap of 526.9 mio. $, steemit should reach a minimum of 2.35 mio. users.
This first calculation makes me think that steemit is currently far overvalued.
Furthermore I made the assumption that the user base of Facebook now is relatively stable. I think there's not much user growth to expect. On the other hand, steemit is growing considerably.
I assume that there is a constant growth rate, i.e. that we have an exponential growth, as it is common for successful social networks (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/number-active-users-facebook-over-years-214600186--finance.html)
The table below shows the number of users, under certain assumptions (growth rate) by the end of the years 2016-2021:
You see that the development is very much sensitive to the growth rate. 0.27% leads to only 43.4 mio. users by the end of 2021, whereas 0.54% leads to 10.1 billion users.
I come to the conclusion that the current valuation of steemit is rather high and can only be justified with high expectations regarding the development of steemit.
If a growth rate of 0.54% per day of the user base could be reached on a sustainable basis, steemit would have 1.4 billion users by the end of 2020 and - due to a parallel loss of users
for Facebook - steemit would probably exceed Facebook regarding to number of users.
So the most important thing for the success of steemit is growth of user base.
Let's push it and post great content to attract new interested and interesting people!
I am sure I made strong assumptions and there are some flaws in my thoughts; so I'd be glad to read your correction of and your opinion on my statement.
Best wishes and steem on,
Roy