This weeks Journal entries will be asking about how Steemit is growing and who is coming here to determine who my audience will be as I carve out a niche in the Steemit ecosystem.

Planning our Steemit Journey

Are you new here, or have you been a Steemian for awhile? I'm a newbie since tomorrow marks two weeks that I have been on Steemit.

I have really only had time to begin to explore everything this platform has to offer. Yet, I also know that I need to lay the foundation for what I want to get accomplish here and get some initial thoughts of how I begin. Today I'm thinking about three points of strategic thinking that should properly come before a more detailed action plan. These are what I hope to Journal about this week as I think about them and do a bit of research.

1. Steemit User Demographics and capacity for growth (Today)
2. How to define blog identity that adds value to potential interests of current Steemit user base.
3. How to build and connect with real followers.

1a Current Steemit Demographics

First lets talk about Steemit Demographics. For this and the following topic, I will be using these sources:

1. Statistcs Post by @arcange
2. Information from @gavvet provided in this post.
3. Great unique visitor chart made by @me-tarzan

This is just my initial forray into this topic, I will continue to define and discover sources to improve the metrics I can use to understand who is here and how we can serve them.

Current Steem Demographics:

I had to rely on some very high level posters who had some great information available, for which I am thankful. I also made a note to create my own API queries to see what additional data I can find as I would like to keep an eye on some of this data on a regular basis.

@gavvet traffic chart:

@me-tarzan Unique Visitor Chart:

Some Demographic Data:

• The question of current growth trends has been answered to my satisfaction with new user volumes increasing at a rapid rate.
• Lots of traffic from Asia and especially South Korea (per @gavvet)
• Fairly normal distribution of education with graduate degree holders somewhat overrepresented (Per Alexa info)
• Mostly male, but with an higher than normal female population in the crypto-related area.
• Largest age group is 25-34, followed by a decent amount of 35-44. These two groups make up the largest majority of users. (Per gavvet)

Alexa Demographics Chart:

@aruang Favorite Topics Chart:

What topics are people viewing?:

So, according to arcange there have been between 40 and 60 thousand post per day over the last 60 days, yet for example, there have only been 71 thousand posts with the tag music over the entire existence of the blockchain. That said, there were 385 posts about music in one day on a chart not shown here. General topics like food, travel, art, life seem to be well represented, but for example, Games did not show up on any of the charts referenced.

The most popular topic by far is photography, probably because of the ease of posting pictures as opposed to other time-consuming content. This makes one ask what the average facebook user would do if they have to create posts in markdown, and what this subsequently means for general adoption of Steemit by users from other platforms. Also, another question to ask is if most current active users are here primarily for crypto-currency and any other topic as a side interest? Ultimately, it seems that it will be a sign of success of the ecosystem if we can get to the point where gamers for example, are primarily here for the gaming.

This is very helpful information about what is out there now, and about the current user base. If you are posting great content in a less popular topic on Steemit, this does not prevent you from cross-posting to get other followers, however right now the cost of entry is high. By this I mean that it takes fairly long to get an account, and is far harder to do compared with alternate social media platforms. This all needs further exploration.

1b Steemit Capacity for Growth

If I want to grow an audience from a less that currently popular topic, I can always work to bring aficionados over from other platforms. One consideration about doing this is what is the current and near term ability of the ecosystem to scale. This question falls into two aspects, technical and managerial.

A. Technical. If you pull down the main Steemit menu, you will find a link to the Steem Bluepaper. I will probably come out with an new blog series focused on the technical aspects of Steemit and how the relate to build a homestead here in this ecosystem. Suffice to say, that even a cursory reading of this document (which is all I have done so far), shows that the Delegated Proof of State (DPoS) model that Steem uses should provide for scale and speed that we need for the growth of this platform.

B. Managerial. Just as the physical infrastructure is distributed and highly available, so the support infrastructure needs to be the same way in order to scale. Are the developers and maintainers of Steemit developing a distributed model of developer and support resources to allow Steemit to scale to support the planned growth of new migrating users from other platforms? This is very important, and I have not yet found an answer, but again, there is much I have not read. If you know something about this, please drop a comment below.

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What are you doing to get your friends and family on Steemit? Are you planning on bringing follower into the Steemit ecosystem? What are some good ideas for community activities here? Let me know in the comments below, and I will respond to every one.

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Until next time my friends,

@phaazer1 [SquareLink]

If you can Dream it, you can Steem it.

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