I see people posting quite often how bad the Steem retention rate is. There are many who complain that we are losing so many people and that this is a total failure. But my question is it?
Thus, I decided to look into it a bit more.
There are two things we need to look at:
What is Steem's retention rate?
What is the typical retention rate for social media?
I will take the second one first. In doing a search, I did not come up with a lot of stats. I imagine the reason is the same as we are going to have to confront in answering our first question.
The data that I came across was rather old but I imagine it still holds somewhat true. The best source seems to be Statista which tends to have fairly reliable numbers.
According to that site, in 2015, the average retention rate for all social media is 8.7%. That is it.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/523845/highest-retention-social-android-apps/
What jumps out is the rate for Facebook nearing 70%. We all know that Steem is not Facebook so using that is not really comparable. Neither are many of the other social media applications since they have been around for many years.
The other thing to keep in mind is that the 8.7% is an average. If we remove the biggest ones, we find that the average of the "also-rans" would be much lower. Nevertheless, we can go with the 8.7%.
Now we get to the fun stuff.
What is Steem's retention rate?
At present we have roughly 1.1M accounts. According to the stats that 
There are a couple points here to consider. We know that the 1.1.M is accounts, not people. There are a number of people on here with multiple accounts, especially from the early days. I have come across many accounts that joined in mid 2016, late 2016, or early 2017; their first post, 3 minutes ago.
I surmise the first 100K people or so had multiple accounts. Many of these people are developers who keep opening things up under different names. This is conservative but we will presume that there are 100K duplicate accounts leaving us with 1M people.
The 50K accounts mentioned before is those that actually transact. Thus, we need a different way to look at this.
Fortunately, 
In the post, it was shown that Steemit traffic is way down from the start of the year. It went from 1.5M daily visits to 500K. This should surprise nobody as we know traffic is down. So, according to this research, there are 500K visitors to Steemit each day.
But there is a catch.
Also, remember that if you connect from a different device (home/work computer, mobile phone, tablet) you will count as a "new visitor" on each of these devices.
Thus, we cannot conclude there are 500K each day. Hence, we are going to have to make an assumption. Let us say that each person who visited Steemit in October averaged 2 devices. We know there are some who use one device like a mobile while some others will use 3 or 4. But I think an average of two is fairly accurate.
This leaves us with 250K visitors a day. Of these visitors, how many of them are users. I look to this chart to tell the story.
https://busy.org/@vlemon/steemit-statistics-and-big-data-end-of-october-2018-update
I am going to presume account holders access Steemit directly as opposed to using search or social media referral. This is 34.4% of all traffic. Using our 250K visitors, that means we are at 86K. Of course, there could be some people who type in Steemit for a variety of reasons, so let us knock 6K off that total, leaving us with 80K.
Hence, I conclude (with some presumptions made) that roughly 80K Steemians are on here a day. If we feel there are 1M actually account when eliminating duplicates, we are at a retention rate of 8%. This is slightly below the 8.7% average that Statista came up with.
Of course, we need to remember this is Steemit only.
To read that post:
https://busy.org/@vlemon/steem-ecosystem-statistics-and-bigdatas-end-of-october-2018-update
So what is Steem's retention rate?
Based upon this, I think it is safe to say it is somewhere between 7%-9%. This is not outstanding by any stretch of the imagination nor is it going to send Facebook into a panic. Certainly, there is a lot of room for progress.
However, I do not think it accurate to say the rate is abysmal. The rate is close to the average retention rate for all social media sites.
Also, many say that this is after 2.5 years, insisting that Steem should be further along. The truth is that it is ONLY after 2.5 years. Steem is still a very new entity. Most of the social media sites that compile those stats are a lot more than 2.5 years old. We need to remember how long it takes for word to spread.
One final thought: this is the world of cryptocurrency which adds another layer. People do not understand. The vast percentage of people have no idea what it is or how it works. This will change over time.
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