Nearly half (45%) of peakd.com's traffic comes from organic search according to similarweb.com. Comments made by @jarvie in the "Town Hall" on Twitter suggest to me that's likely fairly accurate. It's even higher, 62.5% for hive.blog.
I would argue that the fact that we do not see any meaningful channeling of this traffic into either
- New Hive user accounts or
- Recurring visitors
supports the idea that people land on peakd.com and hive.blog, but they don't find it compelling enough to stick around.
I don't know how many of such users actually go on to visit the home page or trending page, but these are the kinds of things we would need to be looking at to begin to understand why the "content consumer" type user does not stay with Hive.
I don't find that difficult to answer. When I'm on YouTube or other channels, the hurdle for having my own account is low. I've asked this question a lot over the years (on posts like this one): Why doesn't Hive have a guest comment option? If you assume that people don't want to be producers themselves, but just want to browse or comment here and there or leave a "like", why don't we give them the opportunity to do so? How are we supposed to build a larger consumer following without such low entry barriers? I was told that this was a work in progress or that I should check the proposals. So far, however, little or nothing seems to be happening in this direction, as far as I can see. I use Hive as a frontend, not peakd or ecency.