Hive, big in El Salvador

It has been a while since I look a look at how Hive is doing across the various dapps. I do monitor some stats for my own amusement, but I will do a deeper dive today to share.

Firstly, I noticed on Hypestat that peakd is a pretty highly ranked site in El Salvador. I know they are into Bitcoin, but it looks like interest in cryptocurrencies has embraced more useful coins. El Salvador is a fairly small country, but if even 1% of the population actually joined Hive it would have an impact. peakd is doing fairly well in Venezuela too.

These are web stats rather than just logged in users. Looking across the other top web dapps we can see how many people Hive may be reaching globally.

Web stats may not always be useful, but they can give some idea of how used a site is. It is possible that more people use the Ecency mobile apps than the site.

I have checked 'the S site' for 'the other blockchain' and it is ranking much higher. I am not sure they have significantly more active users, but the site may have better SEO for whatever reasons. I am sure many of us left links to it all over the place in the past and that may give it more 'Google juice'. I think we need much better SEO for Hive sites. I have seen some say that having the same content on multiple sites may hamper things, but I am no expert on this.

By the way, 'the B site' ranks way lower.

Over on DappRadar we can get some idea of blockchain activity. I am sure they are missing a lot as some dapps should show a lot more users. Rising Star has over 4000 active users, but only shows 66 there. Obviously Splinterlands is well ahead and the user number is close to the web stats. These numbers are for the last seven days. Not everyone visits every day, so daily numbers will be lower.

It used to be possible to check the numbers on StateOfTheDapps, but they do not seem to be collecting any data recently.

I think Hive still has major issues with brand awareness. It does not help that the name clashes with many other things, including other blockchains. We need to improve on this. We do have lots of people tweeting about it and possibly mentioning on other platforms, but is this reaching far beyond the existing community?

Hive will be two years old in a month or so. It has gained a lot of users, but is way off going viral. I know some will say people are being driven away by what they may perceive as excessive 'policing', but I think they are more of a vocal minority. Still, we cannot afford to drive away people who may be good for Hive for not conforming totally to how others imagine it should be. We should deal with real abuse, but if people are willing to change then they should be given a chance.

I check on some other stats that people like @penguinpablo and @arcange produce. Those indicate that we have seen a fall in the numbers of larger accounts and that is worrying. I have been running the @tenkminnows project for ages and we are showing little sign of reaching that target, which seems a fairly modest one to me.

I am still bullish about Hive with all the active projects, but that is tempered by realism about how many people are actually using it. For a start we could do with converting some of those Splinterlands players into being more social using other dapps. Many may not even be aware that is an option as there is little mention of it on the site.

We have come a long way, but there is still much to do.

Hive five.