Market Share of the Steem Blockchain by Application: March 2018 Analysis

March was a difficult month for cryptocurrencies. The price of Bitcoin fell 35% over the month while many altcoins faced even greater reductions. Steem ended the month around the $1.50 level, close to its low point for the recent bear market and a fall of 55% from the month opening price.

The cryptocurrency markets may well now be rebounding but how did the poor price performance in March affect the Steem blockchain user metrics? And which of our Steem platforms fared best in these challenging conditions?

There are now many different applications and platforms that can be used to post on the Steem blockchain. These platforms are a key part of the value proposition of the blockchain and of the underlying Steem currency. The aim of this monthly analysis is to provide an understanding of the growth and market share of these platforms, giving users some easily digestible figures to assess their continuing development.

This analysis covers:

Background: An overall view of the Steem blockchain user metrics for March 2018 to provide a backdrop for the analyses that follow.
Breakdown by Market Share: The breakdown and ranking of the key Steem blockchain user metrics by platform for the month of March 2018. Analyses are made for: Regular Posters, Post Numbers and Post Payouts. Comparisons are made to February 2018 showing the changes in ranking and the growth from February to March.
Conclusions and Trends: A brief consideration of trends and drivers for the next few months.
0 Summary of Findings and Conclusions
I start by presenting the summary of findings for readers who have limited available time. The full details of the analysis are included in the later sections of this article.

Please note that throughout this analysis:

The figures include only main posts; they do not include comments.
All payouts considered throughout this article are expressed in the currency as seen on the Steemit interface, i.e. SBD treated as $1.
0.1 Background: An overall view of the Steem blockchain user metrics for March 2018
This first analysis provides an overview of the Steem blockchain user metrics for March 2018 to provide a backdrop for the analyses that follow.

In the graphs below:

The light blue line is the number of articles per day and the dark blue line is number of distinct authors. These are plotted against the left hand axis.
The silver columns are author rewards and the gold columns are curator rewards. These are plotted against the right hand axis.
Full View across 2017 and 2018:

0.2 Breakdown by Market Share: Regular Posters
For the breakdown by market share I start by looking at regular poster numbers. I have defined regular posters as users that have posted four or more articles over the month.

The following table shows the number of regular posters for each application over March. The "Change" column is a comparison to the month of February. The rankings are shown for March, with the February ranking in parentheses.

Application Regular posters Change Ranking
steemit 37,812 -12% 1 (1)
esteem 10,664 -8% 2 (2)
busy 6,025 +8% 3 (3)
zappl 3,606 +24% 4 (5)
steepshot 2,630 -4% 5 (6)
dtube 2,211 -5% 6 (7)
dmania 2,125 -30% 7 (4)
dlive 1,065 +29% 8 (8)
utopian 567 -31% 10 (9)
dsound 462 -37% 11 (10)
steempress 193 +53% 12 (16)
bescouted 142 -7% 13 (14)
steemkr 110 -35% 14 (12)
streemian 97 +24% 15 (17)
steemjs 43 +30% 16 (18)
piston-lib 43 +153% 16 (19)
steemauto 33 -76% 18 (15)
decentmemes 24 -85% 19 (13)
other 777 +50% 9 (11)
Total Result 68,629 -9%
Overall, regular user numbers were down 9% when comparing the two months in full, with steemit.com as the biggest platform down 12% (note that this comparison is over the whole month rather than the last week of each month as was applied for the background section above).

This overall comparison hides some interesting detail for the relative performance of each platform:

There was no change in the top three positions but busy.org was the only one of the top three to enjoy growth in regular user numbers, up 8%.
DLive fared best out of the larger platforms, with a bear-market busting 28% increase in regular posters.
Zappl also appears to have fared well according to the above table. However whilst Zappl gained in regular users due to activity in the first half of the month there has subsequently been a substantial fall in use. This is illustrated in the chart below: