I don't usually bother to analyze web traffic on hive.blog, since I'm more focused on the technical development of Hive rather than Hive's success at marketing itself. Still, cloudflare send me a monthly email that shows the amount internet traffic on the site, including some geographical breakdown of that data. So I've long known that the US has consistently been the largest source of our web traffic, ever since the site first launched.
The inspiration of this post was a discussion I was having with @logic. He had found a post that was attempting to do an analysis of hive.blog's traffic based on organic search data (I think, I didn't read too closely) and it made a few incorrect conclusions about traffic on the site, so I decided to publish some of the data we have from cloudflare, after that discussion.
Hive.blog only has the data that cloudflare provides for free, so I can only access the last 30 days worth of traffic data, plus I have those monthly emails which allows me to get a little bit of historical data beyond the past 30 days. So I can only present a few graphs that may be of interest.
US web traffic for Hive.blog
This graph of US traffic was created by taking US traffic data from the emails (I deleted or moved the email from February apparently, so that's why there's a missing bar in the graph):
I'm not really sure why there was such a huge spike of traffic from the US during the month of May (120M), but there may not have been many other sites able to browse Hive posts during that month, so it may have born the brunt of Hive user traffic during that month. My best guess is that peakd, ecency, etc took away a lot of the traffic in the next month, once everyone could return to using their preferred post browser.
The graph shows there's been a steady growth of traffic from October of last year until now (2x growth of US traffic over that period), which is nice, especially since we know a lot of other web sites are getting more traction nowadays as post browsers and therefore competing for total Hive traffic. So overall, this looks pretty promising for overall growth of viewership for Hive social media posts.
Heatmap for hive.blog's worldwide traffic
Here's a heatmap of global traffic to hive.blog, and a numeric breakdown of traffic from the top 5 countries in the last 30 days by country:
A few more from the heatmap
I also manually looked up a few other countries on the heatmap (by mousing over them) and roughly sorted the results. Now, this was a fairly tedious process and there's a lot of countries, so please don't be upset if I missed your country.
- Brazil 8.5M
- Canada 7.4M
- Turkey 7.4M
- Indonesia 6.8M
- Spain 5.8M
- India 5.5M
- France 5.2M
- Nigeria 5M
- Ukraine 4.9M
- Italy 4.6M
- Argentina 4.2M
- Bangladesh 4M
- Poland 3.8M
- Russia 3.4M
- Thailand 3.1M
- Australia 3M
- Portugal 2.9M
- Mexico 2.9M
- Netherlands 2.8M
- Pakistan 2.4M
- Columbia 2.2M
- Vietnam 2M
- S. Korea 1.8M
- Romania 1.7M
- Bulgaria 1.5M
- Serbia 1.5M
- Malaysia 1.4M
- South Africa 1.4M
- Greece 1.5M
- Japan 1.1M
- Austria 1.2M
- Switzerland 1.2M
- New Zealand 1.2M
- Belgium 1M
- Peru 1M
- Chile 1M
- Czech 0.9M
- Sweden 1M
- Norway 0.9M
- Finland 0.8M
- Ireland 0.8M
- Belarus 0.7M
- Croatia 0.7M
- Ecuador 0.7M
- Taiwan 0.5M
- Estonia 0.5M
- Macedonia 0.5M
- Slovenia 0.5M
- Denmark 0.4M
- Slovakia 0.4M
- Hungary 0.4M
- Suriname 0.4M
- Israel 0.3M
- Lithuania 0.3M
- Uruguay 0.3M
- Paraguay 0.3M
- Panama 0.3M
- Costa Rica 0.3M
- Saudi Arabia 0.2M
- Iran 0.2M
- Egypt 0.2M
- Morocco 0.2M
- Kazakhstan
- Algeria 0.2M
- Dominican Republic 0.2M
- Latvia 0.2M
- Sri Lanka 0.2M
- Guatemala 0.2M
- Bolivia 0.2M
- Nepal 0.2M
- Iceland 0.1M
- El Salvador 0.1M
- Kenya 0.1M
- Cuba 0.1M
- China 0.1M
- Bosnia/Herz: 0.1M
- Moldova 0.1M
- Azerbaijan 0.1M
- Oman 0.1M
Seeing Kenya ranking towards the bottom is the reason why I keep staking my hive power. I want to be able to support a community and onboard more kenyans and east africans in the near future.
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I respect users like you and this is the reason we're not incubating country/language based communities but instead hoping to see them thrive on their own and by users supporting them with the stake they've earned/bought. Hopefully linear rewards in the upcoming hardfork will make this easier for smaller accounts as well.
I appreciate the complement, acidyo.
I am one of the people who have benefitted massively from the incubation projects. Linear rewards should encourage more interaction and building up of communities. But the biggest issue I have witnessed with the people we started out with is the lack of a long-term mentality. Most of my friends fell off but they started coming back once they saw how my Hive Power has grown. It was encouraging to them.
Thanks for sharing 👍 I guess this is just the number of total page views? It's regrettable that key metrics are missing to analyze and compare with Similarweb or Alexa statistics such as number of unique visitors, average page view per visitor, average time spent per visitor, traffic source, bounce rate...
https://www.similarweb.com/website/hive.bloghttps://www.similarweb.com/website/hive.blogI'm surprised by the data for France (5.2M) and Thailand (3.1M), at the 12th and 20th position on your list, where communities are quite small. I really think you should consider the question of using ISO 639-2 language as I had suggested in the "General" of MM.
Data from Alexa isn't great, because it's a sampling method, and there's a lot of bias in the way it samples, in my opinion. I don't know what similarweb uses for its data, so can't comment on that.
Size of communities isn't necessarily the main driver for overall traffic. It's likely a reasonable amount of this traffic comes from organic search, and most posts on Hive are written in English, so it's not surprising that countries where English is a primary language tend to rank well.
Yep and Similarweb operate mainly with the same data usage, just some differences in the result, that's why, if we can have real data we can make a better analysis.
Yes, that's why I didn't expect so much for France and Thailand, especially since the page headers are defined for English (lang & hreflang html tags) which doesn't help the seo on google's geolocalized search engines (ex:
google.fr,google.co.th).Now I'll be curious to see if @asgarth and @good-karma will follow you in making a post about peakd and ecency data 😂
France's numbers seem inline with other EU countries, so seems normal to me. I think Thailand may be high in part because I think it has many English expats there.
You know how we French have difficulties with English, much more than any other country in the EU, because of our "cultural exception" 🤣 For Thailand, with the development of digital nomadism there are more expats but I don't know the recent numbers of how many we are.
Wow Philippines is really reading Hive blog. The Filipino Hive community is awesome in promoting Hive content. ♥️🇵🇭♥️
Yep, I was pretty surprised to see Philipines ranking so high on traffic!
@ybanezkim26 been doing a good job onboarding.
Wasn't me. I have a passionate group who are now doing most of the onboarding. I'm focusing on mentorship now.
♥️🇵🇭♥️
Equality BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
Tread lightly, challenger.
Brrr Brrr
@surpassinggoogle will never get the credit he deserves from the BTS camp. We can sure use a guy like that on Steemit.
Steemit?? Gross
Tread lightly, challenger.
brrr
Philippines is the social media capital they say in the survey so just a few more Hive exposure and we may surpass Germany.
I guess my country still has its crown as a social media capital of the world huh?
HIVE!D
Thank you!
Interesting statistics, I did not think that there is so much Ukrainian traffic. I think the ego can be ten times larger. But, what is have now on 90% thanks to the support in the community Team Ukraine.
Link to vote for @cranium as a witness
Do you foresee hive.blog in the future being handed off to another front end team in some way?
I completely get and support the focus of your team on the blockchain level itself, but I’ve seen some folks voicing frustration with hive.blog as it doesn’t get a lot of development love! Some feel that in the eyes of potential new members it’s perceived as the “official” site (largely due to the name itself).
I seem to recall brief mention in another post that you may be reviewing the eCency code base to possibly replace condenser in the future. I could be wrong on that though... so, any thoughts or clarification on the role and management of hive.blog in the future?
We're not the core dev for condenser now. Hive.blog is just one site that uses the condenser code base.
Several developers contribute to the condenser code base, but @quochuy is probably the most prolific contributor right now, and you can find his contributions in his blog feed.
On our of devs, jsalyers on gitlab , also makes contributions to condenser. Generally his changes are to support and test new core features of Hive, like the recently added decentralized lists. Further back in time, we also used condenser to test the changes to the core API libraries to allow for swapping between API nodes when an API node is experiencing problems.
Other devs make changes to support their own dapps (@jpphotography recently made a contribution to support truvvl posts).
I did ask our devs to look at vision (the open-source code base for ecency), and we do expect to contribute to that code base as well in the future, once some more of my frontend devs free up from their current projects. Vision has a better and more modern design framework than condenser.
At one point, I was considering dropping all work on condenser and porting hive.blog to use vision'scode base instead of condenser's code base, but I've come to believe that condenser has one feature that is both a blessing and a curse: it supports server side rendering, which makes maintaining the code a pain, but is apparently very beneficial for organic search ranking. Because of this, I don't see us replacing condenser on hive.blog until this is no longer such a big issue. I think it's important that Hive has at one site that does well in organic search ranking.
Clicked on the two bottom devs, but the links are apparently broken.
Yep, sorry, missed a p in jpphotography, and the other was a gitlab handle, not a hive handle.
I wonder how this would look like on steemit? similar? different? any thoughts? Sorry not meant to be controversial just curious.
It's a reasonable question, but I've no idea, as I've never had access to cloudflare data for steemit.
My second thought after pausing a few moments to consider these numbers.... Where the hell are all these posters and commentors?! We either have quite a few lurkers, a low retention rate, or a small number of very obsessed Hivers!
Hive.blog does well in organic search rankings, so there are likely to be many visitors who just come to read a particular article, without ever joining the Hive community.
This is also a good point. It sure would be nice if posters could see the view count on posts or if there was a like button that didn't require an account. Might help encourage people through periods with low payouts!
lurkers were a big majority on reddit too for the longest time
This is a great point.
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This is part of what makes Hive what I like to call a 'propagative currency'. It sort of propagates itself rapidly through its low cost (zero) and low tech knowledge requirement to entry. It would not surprise me to learn that Hive is in more individual hands than any other digital currency.
so someone tell me again why we are not monetizing all of that traffic?
Before the fork, steemit.com probably had more traffic than hive.blog has, at least during the times when the price was very high. Yet I don't think they ever were making more than $30K per month from advertising and they undoubtebly had to "spend money" in the form of human effort to make that money. From my point of view, numbers that low shouldn't be the focus for how to grow Hive as a currency.
It's interesting how close to each other the Scandinavian countries are:
except for Denmark but no one cares about them anyway.
Lol the Dans
Wow well this gives me a lot of information that I wasn't really aware of thank you very much and hopefully we will see you quite a huge increase in traffic from across the globe
Interesting. I would have thought by now all the other frontends would have eroded a lot more of the traffic than that.
According to Alexa the Hive blog is still ranking higher than the other frontends I looked into.
I wonder which of the top regions are being under served for exchange options.
I suspect this could be due to the server side rendering issue I mentioned.
Are you sure it’s May and not June? June 6 was the capital incident here in the US. There were a lot of people who got deplatformed that week.
Yes, it was May 2020, the graph shows the data for the prevous 30 days, so when you seen 7/01/20, that is the data for June.
Also, if you're referring to the invasion of the Capital building, that happened on 01/06/21 (January 6th).
Ha! Derrrrp. Only one year off. Don’t judge! :)
We're all entitled to a few of those, just don't judge me when it's my turn :-)
Consider it done!
Pretty interesting to see france rate so high, I didn't know that the french community was that big anymore.
As I mentioned in comment to mintrawa, this is traffic (more correlated with readership), not a measure of post counts.
Well yes but still I didn't expect so many french readers haha
I'm not the only one to think this 🤣 👍
Pretty interesting. I'm more interested on what the APIs are like. Especially the heavily used ones like api.hive.blog, deathwing's and @pharesim's. Would be nice to see what gets used the most(probably api.hive.blog the most since thats the default on many programs, but I wonder if a lot switch to deathwing's because it is known for being more stable).
I don't think deathwing is more stable, per se. But I think his setup is probably closest to ours in terms of power and it's a lot less heavily loaded I think. Currently, I think api.hive.blog handles almost all the traffic from hive.blog, for instance.
I did publish some of our data for api.hive.blog: https://hive.blog/hive-139531/@blocktrades/hive-api-node-performance-measurement
I'd be interested to see the traffic on some of the other nodes, and if some other nodes would be willing to run the analyzer on their site, I could post an update with more recent data from the jussi traffic analyzer.
I was trying to get the traffic analyzer working at one point, but as far as I recall, you guys use a custom jussi structure. Which meant that my jussi wasn't really capable of working with the traffic analyzer. I'll maybe look into it later on.
I think what Rishi meant (as well as some other people I've heard from) is mainly revolving around the networking of hive.blog -- unfortunately, it seems like OVH's network has been relatively on fire (pun intended) for the last couple of months, causing dropouts from time to time or in the best-case scenario, sudden latency spikes. (usually lasting about 10-ish seconds, but it's enough for it to error out).
Unfortunately, it's really hard to get a "usage metric" per se with jussi. The best possible ways I found so far were -- link usage (per second), bandwidth use (per month) and active connections to the node.
I may write a post on it soon.
For benchmarking, I think @fullnodeupdate overall is doing a great job. While it is sometimes vague and counts things that may mess up the stats (block latency, for example, which isn't always accurate) it's a nice overlook to most nodes.
Check with @gtg, he can assist you in getting your logging correct. It's not really "custom jussi structure", just a configuration of the log settings. IMO, it shouldn't be difficult, with a little assistance, and I think it should work fine for a usage metric.
I don't think the issue is OVH (other than that one time, when there was an actual fire), but we have seen cases where cloudflare has blocked some locations (while most locations are simultaneously able to access it without a problem). I suspect it's related to their DDOS attack prevention system. There are occasional attacks launched against our jussi node.
I have my doubts about all the remote benchmarking tools I've seen. They mostly seem to report different results depending on where you run them from. That's why I think local data at the node is best, if you're trying to measure performance of the node itself, and not external network issues.
Hmm, might be. OVH's own DDOS protection might be dropping packets too.
I agree, That's why I think looking at active DL/UL rate and overall monthly bandwidth usage, as well as established netstat connections (for 443 should work, more or less) to be able to (at least partially) understand the average use on the node.
It seems like on average in April 2021 (so far)
api.deathwing.meused more than 2.5 TB BW (uploaded) with an average of 10 Mbps. Overall established connections stay at about ~650. I've seen it get close to ~1k whenapi.hive.bloghad an issue a couple of weeks ago. (though this just shows the active users at the time of checking it, so the majority are probably bots.)Even without any statistics and just looking at overall use on logs, I can honestly say that I would not be surprised if
api.deathwing.meis the second most used node on the chain.I was wondering if it would be possible to somewhat implement/upgrade jussi with some new features such as monitoring active connections, calls, chart data etc. In other words, log everything in an organised manner and make it easy so we don't have to scour through tens of gigabytes of logs :P (I know @good-karma was building a project, an upgraded version of jussi, but I don't know it's latest status.)
From my point of view, I'm more interested in the amount of each type of api traffic rather than raw amount as it is more useful for optimization work, that's why I'd like to get the jussi traffic analyzer data.
Would love to see more up to date stats. I remember talking about how one of the nodes in the clusters might be timing out and I think that probably got fixed by now since I haven't seen that in a while on your node.
Come on North Korea. Where you at???
It's not tracked or something. That's the only country which says: n/a (not applicable). It was kind of weird.
Excellent statistics, good information. I didn't know that in Brazil there was a big community.
Me neither, but it's a big place with a lot of people, so I guess I shouldn't have been surprised by the traffic from there.
Great post! Good information!
Is there a way to get active accounts by country?
Thank you.
That's probably something best done via api node traffic analysis. But that kind of analysis will probably be done by the guys working on the marketing proposal. This was just some readily available data I had access to.
Thank you very much, I would like to get in touch with them, can you introduce me?.
There's a channel in the Hive dev mattermost channel where most can be reached.
Great that someone is reading us in Nepal 😆
Excellent work @blocktrades
I was surprised by the traffic that my country Argentina has, I think there is an explanation, and it has to do with the arrival of many immigrants to the country, especially Venezuelan citizens, who have a culture developed in the blockchain.
Thank you very much for the hard work to provide us with this information.
I wish you all a happy start to the week
Nigeria 5M? Much wow! Who could’ve thunk!?
Germany is also quite active on Hive :)
I think Germany has been 3rd or 4th by traffic on a fairly consistent basis.
Canada all the way!!
Thanks for sharing these numbers. I have only one question as I remember a discussion about this same topic some time ago. Do these stats also include traffic to the image server?
So it's basically a sum of
request to hive.blog + request to images.hive.blog?No, this is traffic to hive.blog only.
Got it, thanks 👍
Thanks for giving us this information. However can, we get the active list of country with their population. I
This is all the data I have, I don't usually bother doing analytics for the site.
I know that might be surprising, but I think it's future work that will really drive new users to Hive rather than trying to make tweaks based on the current traffic sources, so that's where I focus most of my attention.
There is a marketing proposal going now that I suppose will likely want to collect more analytics data in the future, if only to help demonstrate the positive results of their work.