As a stakeholder in Steemit (just like you) I want to know where the organization stands, compared with other similar organizations (I intently avoided the term "competition" here).
So I spent a good hour digging through Wikipedia, Quantcast, Coinmarketcap, Steemd and Quora, in a quest to find relevant information about the market.
I picked only 3 metrics: market cap, alexa rank and monthly visitors. Alexa rank is informative and I don't give it too much credit, it just shows some general interest.
All data is between 2014 and 2016 and some of the information pertains to transactions which already happened (Tumbr was acquired by Yahoo for $1.1 billion). Another observation about Medium traffic, the 25 millions monthly users is a number pulled from an interview Ev gave to CNN in December, but Quantcast shows only $1.9 millions per month (just an estimate, Medium doesn't have the Quantcast tag, as far as I understand). The traffic for Steemit was based on Steemd "active" users for the last 30 days, but that takes into account only users who voted, commented or posted, the traffic could easily be double or triple than that, but it's in the same ballpark, compared with the other sites.
I didn't give specific sources links for each number, because it will have bloated the text, but you can go to the websites mentioned above and do some basic search. If you come up with different numbers, do let me know.
Below is the aggregated data.
| Site | Market Cap (mils) | Alexa Rank | Monthly Visitors (mils) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Steemit | 36 | 16453 | 0.013 |
| Medium | 132 | 333 | 25 |
| StackOverflow | 459 | 43 | 29 |
| 500 | 24 | 234 | |
| Quora | 900 | 154 | 100 |
| Tumblr | 1100 | 39 | 555 |
As you can see, in terms of monthly visitors, Steemit doesn't event count here. It's natural, it's not even past its first year. But it does count in the market cap area and that's a key information. It means money is there and it's ready to flow in whatever direction will be profitable. Who will take that decision and when (given the decentralized structure of Steemit) that's another question.
Another interesting observation is the valuation of Quora which is almost double than StackOverflow or Reddit, at half the number of visitors for Reddit and three times more than StackOverflow. Weird.
But here's where it gets interesting:
The chart represents the market cap distribution among all players.
I see at least two possible scenarios:
- A consolidation between Steemit and Medium. It only looks natural. Together they will have 5% of the market in terms of market cap and Medium will get a big asset by implementing the Steem blockchain technology.
- The launch of a Q&A platform based on the Steem blockchain, completely different than Steemit.com. It may be launched by Steemit Inc, or it may be launched by anybody, using the same blockchain. Hardfork 17 will implement an arbitrarily splitting of the rewards feature that will enable big players to put resources in significant projects, knowing that a revenue-share option is feasible and easy to implement. The rationale behind such a decision is based on the combined marketplace of StackOverflow and Quora, which is 44%. A new player could easily get in this Eldorado. If he scraps only 1%, it will get $13 millions! Quora + StackOverflow = $1,359 millions market cap.
Of course, there are many other metrics, like the value of a member account on each platform, which I didn't take into account, the data here is a bit foggy. Also, I didn't take into account, intently, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. I don't think they're doing the same thing, although they are players on social media too.
My final observation is that the money is still in the blogging platforms, not in the Q&A platforms. The high end of the market cap is occupied by Tumblr (both in terms of market cap and users) and the low end is also occupied by blogging platforms (Steemit and Medium). Q&A, where money flows faster, but where the audience is also more limited and highly niched, is in the middle. That means, for me that, as a blogging platform, it takes a lot of time to grow a loyal audience, 4-6 years. Once you get there, though, the affinity of those users is way bigger than in Q&A platforms.
Questions? Criticism? Other scenarios?
I'm a serial entrepreneur, blogger and ultrarunner. You can find me mainly on my blog at Dragos Roua where I write about productivity, business, relationships and running. Here on Steemit you may stay updated by following me @dragosroua.
https://steemit.com/~witnesses
Very interesting. Thank you for your research.
The numbers show Steem is still a very small player in the field and the potential is huge. On the other hand, based on the visitor numbers and the market cap one could also conclude the price of Steem is overvalued at the moment. A lot of expectation is priced in.
I think the first investment in Medium was around $30 mils as well and without too much confirmation on technology or adoption. I don't think Steemit is overvalued, I think the price is fair now and, given enough adoption and organic growth it can go easily to half a dollar by the end of the year (please don't trade using my opinion :) ).
'A lot of expectation is priced in.' This is the most sound comment here. The valuation of steem can only be based upon steemit as this is the only current outlet where the currency has any application. The fact that less than 400 accounts hold 90% is an important situation. No equity would get through an IPO (were there such a thing) on such a stat.
Stickability of subscribers is a critical stat in Social Media as well - I would have to endorse your assessment that the valuation on current pricing is inflated.
According to Hypestat Steemit gets 0.8 million monthly visitors, but a lot of those won't be logged in. This number would mean more if the site had ads that need views, but it indicates that people are finding Steemit.
I think the Steemit platform would be great for a Q&A site. Stackoverflow gets a lot of activity just offering a reputation score. The danger for them of offering rewards is that it could attract a lot of spam or low value responses.
0.8 mils monthly visitors is a lot more than 0.013, but still under 1 mil, thanks for the info. Q&A platforms are interesting but they need a highly niched audience and maintenance. StackOverflow uses moderators which are very active. Spam won't be a problem, attracting the right kind of visitors will be.
That 0.8 million probably isn't unique visitors as I think Hypestat just multiplies the daily number (around 27k). That's still a fair few potential new users who are finding Steemit via search engines.
Tsu managed to recruit a few million users in their 20 month life (shut down last year), but that was helped by having referral rewards and a lot of those users were never active. The growth of Steemit is less dramatic. Seems to be a few hundred each day and some of those may be bots. It's the active users who really matter and that number is not changing much from what I've seen.
I'm just wondering how Steemit gets to the next level of million+ users.
I think at least 100,000 accounts may be bots, but what is interesting is that the number of active users is increasing steadily. I'm using steemd.com distribution page. 2-3 months ago the number of daily active users was around 1,500. Now it's around 5,000. That's 300% increase. It's a good speed.
Think IOT transaction processing.
@gutzofter what do you mean by that?
Steemit is one of the fastest transaction processors on a blockchain. This place is made for machines. I foresee an enormous influx of IOT bots coming on here, to publish their data and to get their command instructions. How many personal health tracker devices and thermostats?
Never thought of it like this. Yes, it does open a lot of possibilities...
Interesting stuff.
Even more interesting would be what were the market caps, visitors etc of these sites in their first year?
Then compare that with Steemit.
That might give some of the more skeptical people a vision of where we are headed, and how far ahead (or behind) the game we are.
Thanks for analysis!
Great analyses!
Thanks!
It may be good to keep tracks of those number all along 2017. With the planned developments, I am expecting big changes. We will then see :D
Yeap, I agree. These numbers are based on a bigger time window: 2014-2016, so right now, the market cap of those businesses may be different (Tumblr may be evaluated together with Yahoo, for instance, since it's one of their assets now). But I am also expecting big changes and having a starting point, like this post, will be useful in the future.
Definitely!
Interesting and usefull. Resteemed.
That's really excellent information
Thanks! :)
Nice post!!
upvoted and resteemed @dragosroua
Thanks!
We can surely be the top of that list. Once a lot of people see the benefit of Steemit it would really be awesome.
We should have something implemented like quora, ask any type of question and the best answer gets most of the upvotes. That could bring many more people to steemit as it will not only be a platform where you can share ideas and content but by asking simple / complex questions and answered by experienced users will bring a real unique sense to the Steemit platform.
I share your optimism regarding Steemit, but I think it will take a lot more time and it won't be a linear transition, most likely there will be a few bumps along the road. As for the difference between blogging and Q&A platform, I already said something in the post: there's a clear difference between them.
A Steem based Q&A site might attract a lot of new users. "Get paid to ask and answer questions." Is anyone working on that?
AFAIK,no. It has to be heavily backed and advertised to compete with Quora and StackOverflow. Needs relevant money upfront.
I've had the same thought, and would like to see SteemIt integrated into Stackoverflow. Maybe you can join the discussion on that end.