HIVE Had Its Worst* Year in 2023 - Here is How LeoAds + SEO Can Help

A blockchain needs users and according to the statistics compiled by @dalz, we had the worst year for user growth. Let us not forget the fact that when we were known as STEEM a few years ago (I joined over 6 years ago as the 258,740th account), the price of the Token was around $1 for a significant amount of time and that was before the ATH of $8.19 that happened 6 years ago.

HIVE Account Creation

All HIVE accounts are forced into having usernames. This is somewhat similar to having Ethereum Name Service, but far cheaper. Creating account require to burn 3 HIVE or a large amount of Resource Credits. @dalz mad the article linked above with many important statistics. I did not expect to see 2023 as the worst year yet! We have come so far with a great many developments to HIVE! They don't seems to have mattered much in the grand scheme of things.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

The quote is misattributed Einstein. The widom contained in it remains true nonetheless. The Whales and developers should take a look at how worse projects with weaker technology have come to surpass what we have built and consider the areas we have failed at. Complaining does not fix things. Build it and they will come is an idea that has not worked over the years. We have to consider that we have not built enough of the right things. We may have to use DHF differently to achieve the best for HIVE in 2024 and beyond.

LeoAds is Trying Something New!

LeoAds Protocol changed the way way content creation is incentivized on HIVE. The best part is that it does not diminish any of the good things that have been working well with HIVE. LeoAds improved HIVE without replacing anything. One of the things you know about HIVE is need to change. LeoGlossary will have you covered on most of the basic things you need to know about HIVE. SplinterGlossary specifically covers @splinterlands related topics.

Now HIVE has a front end that has all the perks of a traditional blogging site supported by ads. There is no need for any other front end to achieve the same. @leofinance has this niche covered. The revenue from the ads are converted to LEO and staked to the authors that generated the traffic. Incentives have changed for the bloggers.

I need to generate 200+ page views to be eligible for LeoAds revenue. This creates a goal for the authors to be more active while keeping the goal low enough to be achievable. There is no dashboard yet. Users have to manually check their page views by visiting the following website:

https://simpleanalytics.com/inleo.io.json?version=5&fields=pageviews,histogram&pages=*threads/view/username*&start=2024-01-01

We Need Good SEO

A short introduction would be to call SEO a set of techniques that help content rank higher on search engine results in order to get more traffic. If there is more traffic to InLeo website, it helps the entire HIVE community in many ways.

  • More revenue for LeoAds Protocol.
  • More LEO staked for active authors.
  • SEO gets automatically improved for all front ends.
  • More users will read about and discover HIVE DAPPs.
  • More users drawn into the account creation funnel.
  • Authors get to spread their ideas more and get better recognition.

The Most Important Missing Piece for The 2024 Bull Market

If we combine good SEO while making it extremely easy for new users to invest into HIVE assets, we could try to recreate the previous highs we have experienced in user activity + market valuations. @terablock-hive could be a massive help in the process and urge everyone to read their blog and check out Proposal 295 which can lead to more developments and integrations for HIVE.

Few Educational Sources on SEO

I am not an expert in SEO. I have learned some basics through blogs and videos. Most of the good SEO content creators I have seen offer some paid services and they tend to have blogs. I will link some of the videos below to get started.

You do not have to make massive changes. We have thousands of authors on HIVE. If enough of us post using InLeo with improved SEO, we could make a significant impact and bring more users to all front ends and get evergreen rewards for the work we do.

Best of Luck!

Posted Using InLeo Alpha



0
0
0.000
44 comments
avatar
(Edited)

PIZZA!

$PIZZA slices delivered:
vimukthi tipped ura-soul
@vimukthi(1/5) tipped @stefano.massari (x3)
arc7icwolf tipped vimukthi
jfuji tipped vimukthi
ana-maria tipped vimukthi
vimukthi tipped arc7icwolf
vimukthi tipped lordshah
speedtuning tipped vimukthi

0
0
0.000
avatar

I very much emphasize the importance of SEO in my feedback to InLeo team. Let's see when will upgrade and InLeo could be seen on different search engines.

0
0
0.000
avatar

At least there is an incentive for users to be more conscious about SEO. There are 1000+ active users with over 200 of them being Premium users who are willing to pay for what is basically a front end as a service.
!PIZZA

0
0
0.000
avatar

Stay tuned for a DHF proposal I am working on to address all of these points :)

0
0
0.000
avatar

I will be looking forward to it. I check out DHF Proposals few times a month. I will take a look when it goes live. I wish you the best with getting the votes. I have seen many promising Proposals fail to get funding.
!PIZZA

0
0
0.000
avatar

This post has been manually curated by @bhattg from Indiaunited community. Join us on our Discord Server.

Do you know that you can earn a passive income by delegating your Leo power to @india-leo account? We share 100 % of the curation rewards with the delegators.

100% of the rewards from this comment goes to the curator for their manual curation efforts. Please encourage the curator @bhattg by upvoting this comment and support the community by voting the posts made by @indiaunited.

0
0
0.000
avatar

I also noticed that HIVE didn't have a good year, unlike other projects. This worries me a little

0
0
0.000
avatar

We should do fine for the next 1-2 years because of the bull market. If we do not carve out a strong presence for ourselves with a strong userbase, the next bear market is going to be an awful one (at least form the point of view of an investor).
!PIZZA

0
0
0.000
avatar

Agreed dear Inleo improve hive without replacing anything. It's now on the part of Leo content creators to create SEO ranked content and avail Leo ads revenue.

0
0
0.000
avatar

It was a bad year for HIVE, while some projects showed some investor interest, HIVE lost 40%

0
0
0.000
avatar

Very interesting article! I especially like this graph about the number of accounts created. When looking at it, one might ask, "For God's sake, what was happening to Hive and on Hive in 2021?!" I mean, almost 1M (900K) new accounts are a lot (especially, comparing with other years and some onboarding average).

But the reason why was that so is actually very simple!
In 2021 Splinterlands ran a marketing campaign for its game and in connection with the Chaos Legion cards launch. They were "guilty" for most of those 900K new accounts.
On October 26, 2021, they announced they had been sold 700K Spellbooks.

This also explains Hive price moves at the time when Hive moved from about $0.5 (at the end of September 2021) up to an enormous high of $2.67 (on December 1st, 2021), from when and where just kept falling till today.

The small rest, in my opinion, would be due to the global Covid lockdown.

However, today, Hive has about 2.5M accounts created. And it's not a small number, but IMO, it's not about how many accounts we have.
A way more important question is how many of them are active?!

For a couple of years, @penguinpablo was publishing on a daily basis different and very interesting Hive data. Unfortunately, some people didn't like what he was doing (or at least didn't want such data to be that openly published, as not everyone knows how to dig them out), so he was attacked, downvoted, or even accused of some sort of alleged self-plagiarism (although the numbers were always different, and he had to dig them out over and over again), or even unfair "reaping" of the reward pool. He stopped posting about a year and a half ago!
But if we take a look at his last post from August 22, 2022 and published data about "Daily accounts transacting" (on Hive) we will see that there were only 10,000 up to at most 15K active users/accounts per day.
And I don't think that today (17 months later), these numbers are any different or exceeded too much (if at all) 20K per day. And that's less than 10% (or more precisely, devastating 8%) of the total number of accounts.

(I.e., in first 10 days of this year /2024/ 100 accounts were created, only 12 of them posted at least one post in these past 30-40 days, all the rest are blank, empty accounts with zero RC and zero HP. In other words, 88% of them are not used even for gaming purposes only.)


To cut the chase!

With the first half of your article, I would almost entirely agree, but when it comes to LeoAds and SEO on LEO, unfortunately, I can't (and I'll explain why), although all the common sense and logic are on your side.

  • 1st - Google (or some big players hiding behind it and running the global show) doesn't like Hive blockchain, so their algorithm obstructs and ignores it as much as possible (and it's not because of odd and awkward, but common Hive tagging, completely SEO unfamiliar).
    Therefore, IMO, it's just a matter of time when Google boys (or their algorithms) would figure out that LeoFinance, InLeo (or whatever new domain would be) is just another interface for the same Hive (blockchain) thing, and all our SEO efforts done in the meantime will go down the "toilet."

  • 2nd - We have way bigger problems around here than SEO is or that SEO can solve.
    For example, new account creation (especially when talking about available free-of-charge options) is actually extremely hard and stressful for an average Joe arriving from FB, X, Instagram, or similar.
    Lack of easy-to-find and access support.
    Imagine that your first encounter with Hive blockchain was through InLeo, and you are unaware of the main Hive pages (Hive.io or Hive.blog) or even less about other interfaces. You followed all the instructions on the way and stored all the keys carefully, and you have been happily using your account for a month or so. But then, all of a sudden, your keys don't work, and you can't access your account. - Where to find some help? - Try to find some FAQs, How ToS, Support, Contacts, or similar links/pages on InLeo! - There isn't! - Who to ask when you are logged out? (Exactly my daughter's case not so ago.)
    What actually happened?! - By signing up, they actually create a so-called Light account. (What light account? What "heavy" account - or whatever the other one is called? Who knows about it and what it is? An average Joe that just arrived from FB, X, Instagram, or something similar?! I don't think so! - I didn't know about it, and I've been here for 8 years, all the way through, trying to follow new happenings.)
    However, after a month or so of such Light account creation, by automation, they change all initially given access keys for security reasons. - How is that possible? - Easy! They assign themselves as account recovery account.
    How to get out of this situation? - Relatively easy if you know how, but if you don't and if you don't have a mom who has been around 8 years to dig the answer for you, you would be screwed, as there are NO FAQs, How ToS, Support, Contacts, or similar, as I said before.

It's just one of the signup examples. I could give you more with different interfaces and signup options, but I'll stop here as this comment is already too long.

The point is that we have way more important crucial issues to solve here before dealing or playing with SEO if we, in the first place, want higher activity and better engagement, and only then better and wider adoption, especially if we are aware that above-mentioned two things are only the tip of the iceberg.

!ALIVE
!PIZZA
!LUV
!LOLZ
!PGM

0
0
0.000
avatar

@vimukthi! You Are Alive so I just staked 0.1 $ALIVE to your account on behalf of @ ana-maria. (1/20)

The tip has been paid for by the We Are Alive Tribe through the earnings on @alive.chat, feel free to swing by our daily chat any time you want, plus you can win Hive Power (2x 50 HP) and Alive Power (2x 500 AP) delegations (4 weeks), and Ecency Points (4x 50 EP), in our chat every day.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Sent 0.1 PGM - 0.1 LVL- 1 STARBITS - 0.05 DEC - 1 SBT - 0.1 THG - 0.000001 SQM - 0.1 BUDS - 0.01 WOO - 0.005 SCRAP - 0.001 INK tokens

remaining commands 9

BUY AND STAKE THE PGM TO SEND A LOT OF TOKENS!

The tokens that the command sends are: 0.1 PGM-0.1 LVL-0.1 THGAMING-0.05 DEC-15 SBT-1 STARBITS-[0.00000001 BTC (SWAP.BTC) only if you have 2500 PGM in stake or more ]

5000 PGM IN STAKE = 2x rewards!

image.png
Discord image.png

Support the curation account @ pgm-curator with a delegation 10 HP - 50 HP - 100 HP - 500 HP - 1000 HP

Get potential votes from @ pgm-curator by paying in PGM, here is a guide

I'm a bot, if you want a hand ask @ zottone444


0
0
0.000
avatar

I have seen HIVE articles pop up in the search results. I have not done a great deal of research into the inner workings of SEO. Maybe eventually Big Tech will censor HIVE from their search results. The goal should be to grow enough of a userbase that would come and use HIVE DAPPs directly without going through Google or any other search engine.

We have had an FAQ since 2017. I read this page when I joined in 2017. I don't know how old it is. We also have https://docs.inleo.io with a lot of information. The problem is that these resources are not prominently featured across all front ends.

Support is mostly on Discord (unfortunately) and resources on the inner workings of HIVE are not easy to find as something for Ethereum. Creating an educational series on these things could go a long way to help new users.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Oh, you finally saw (after a whole month) my "tiny" comment! 😄
However, thank you for the reply!

I agree with you...

The goal should be to grow enough of a userbase that would come and use HIVE DAPPs directly without going through Google or any other search engine.



But, in that case, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is useless, and we don't need it.


When it comes to...

We have had an FAQ since 2017. I read this page when I joined in 2017. I don't know how old it is.



Well, in 2017, Hive didn't exist! It was created at the beginning of 2020, and in a couple of days, it will celebrate its fourth birthday.
So, if we want to be completely honest, when you joined in 2017, you were actually joining Steemit (where you are still active, as far as I can see), and, in fact, you were reading Steemit FAQ, the same as I did in 2016 when I joined.

Furthermore, and when it comes to Hive FAQ, it's, unfortunately, just more or less copied & pasted Steemit FAQ, with some necessary changes, adjustments, and cosmetics. As such, the same as the whole Hive blockchain, it would also be 4 years old in a couple of days and full of outdated and non-valid, or even never applicable to Hive data and info, still with some links to 8 years-old Steemit posts that were just republished on Hive.

But even that, it's not the main issue.
If you take a look at account creation data just for the last two years (2022 and 2023), you'll see that those who arrived by landing first on Hive Blog are just a couple of accounts. That pushes the Hive Blog interface to the bottom of the onboarding list.

So, the main issue is that the vast majority of newcomers wouldn't find even that 8-year-old Steemit FAQ reshaped to be a Hive FAQ.


Regarding...

We also have https://docs.inleo.io with a lot of information.



I think you answer that one by yourself.

The problem is that these resources are not prominently featured across all front ends.



In other words, yes, we have Docs on InLeo with a lot of information, but for an average newcomer Joe who landed first on InLeo (the same as on many other interfaces) it actually doesn't exist as there is no link, and no info about it.


I entirely agree with you when you said that...

Support is mostly on Discord (unfortunately) and resources on the inner workings of HIVE are not easy to find...



Besides, regarding Discord, aside from the fact that it's a separate service from the Hive blockchain, there is also another issue. For instance, where on InLeo would you find a link to their Discord server? - You wouldn't! There isn't!
So, even if our average newcomer Joe is very lucky (still has access to his/her account, as they haven't change the keys yet), and someone tells him/her that some support might be found on Discord; how he/she is going to find that server if the helping person doesn't have an invite link??? - He/she wouldn't find it!
Why? - Because, if he/she goes to Discord and tries to search for InLeo official server, it's not listed among discoverable servers! He/she may go to Discord's "Explore Discoverable Servers" and there, with whatever keyword(s) try to search and find that community, it would be unsuccessful!


When it comes to...

Creating an educational series on these things could go a long way to help new users.



There are tons of educational series already being written, but unfortunately, they are not easy to find, either through search engines or even less through local searches (somewhat available on some interfaces).


To conclude...
People get lost on the easiest platforms and services, which have easy-to-find, read, and understand instructions that are strict and to the point. Expecting that an average Joe (more or less lazy and superficial) would be interested, persistent, and dedicated enough to find a way and survive in this "jungle" (as it is now), seems quite unlikely and very unrealistic to me.


And last but not least...
Thank you for upvoting my comment, although it was in vain. - Why in vain? - My comment was already a month old when you upvoted it, and articles and comments older than 7 days don't get the reward when upvoted after that. I know you know that!
I assume you were counting on InLeo's "evergreen." - Well, here is the thing, your article wasn't published using the InLeo interface, and therefore, you may forget "evergreen."
In other words, you reduced your voting power anyway (and for nothing) while I didn't gain anything. 😁
Did you know about that InLeo's "evergreen" trick?!

0
0
0.000
avatar

SEO may not be a good way to increase HIVE userbase now due to the lack of resources to help new users handle this "jungle". At the very least it will help to bring more readers to HIVE. If SEO did not work, there will not be billions of dollars invested in it. At the time @leofinance is the only project that has created a method to directly benefit from having readers.

Getting users interested in one game and allowing them to learn about HIVE over the course of few years as could be an effective method. I know that gamers can be very persistent individuals that do a lot of research and learn about complex systems when they are interested in a game or any other technology. They are a small niche; but could be the best type of users to onboard at the moment.

The age of HIVE is not a very simple matter. My account is shown to be around since 2017 no matter what front end or block explorer you use. There are content and transaction histories dating back to 2016. HIVE has more active users, bigger marketcap and more developer activity than STEEM. HIVE is the dominant fork. BLURT on the other hand reset everything except account balances when they forked. They are close to reaching their 4th birthday. The answer of HIVE's age is a more nuanced one.

I publish all my long form articles through InLeo. I don't know if they consider where comments are published when considering Leo Ads payouts.

0
0
0.000
avatar
(Edited)

The age of HIVE is not a very simple matter.

It's either not a very complex one. When devs built the fundamental structure of the Hive blockchain to launch it as it is, they needed an interface. The first and only interface at the very beginning was hive.blog, and it's publically available data that this domain was registered on March 11, 2020.
So, the Hive age doesn't seem very complicated to me.

If, on the other hand, you would like to count the age of the Hive blockchain by the date when it was accepted on CoinMarketCap (as the world's most-referenced price-tracking website for crypto-assets) where the HIVE coin was listed first, then the date is March 27, 2020.
So, as you may see, however you turn it around, the age of the Hive is calculated from March 2020.

My account is shown to be around since 2017 no matter what front end or block explorer you use. There are content and transaction histories dating back to 2016.

LOL 😂 - I would really love it if you could show me those blocks containing content and/or transactions that your account (this one) was able to produce even before its creation.

0
0
0.000
avatar
  1. Website and a blockchain are 2 separate things. Some blockchains had their website launch before there was a mainnet. For some blockchains, front ends came after.
  2. If a blockchain is not listed on CoinMarketCap, does it mean the blockchain does not exist?

LOL 😂 - I would really love it if you could show me those blocks containing content and/or transactions that your account (this one) was able to produce even before its creation.

Of course! A block explorer is the highest authority on the age of a blockchain as it directly deal with the blocks that make up the blockchain.

Don't forget that https://hive.blog itself show that I have joined in 2017 and over 250K accounts that are even older. These are simple obvious facts.

0
0
0.000
avatar

This has been a very interesting read: I didn't know about the 200 view threshold for leoads revenue! And about the SEO, may I ask you in a few words what does it mean? It's the use of some specific words which are searched a lot and, thus, can attract more traffic?

0
0
0.000
avatar

SEO is not a single thing or technique. It is an umbrella term for all the things web developers and content creators do to rank higher in websites. In the old days what mattered were simple things like stuffing some relevant keywords at the tittles and opening paragraphs and getting more links from and to the website.

These days there are more things at play such as bounce time. If a visitor quickly leaves a website after visiting, that is bad for SEO. If a website is slow to lead, that is bad for SEO. YouTube channels I linked have a great deal of content on SEO techniques. I use some of the basic things. For an example I try to name the images I post with the relevant keywords to the topic. I try to add multiple links to other websites that are part of HIVE. These are few simple things anyone can do.

!PIZZA

0
0
0.000
avatar

Many thanks for the explanation! I'll check the videos, but at least now I have a better idea of this concept and a few hints on how to improve my posts :)

!PGM !PIZZA

0
0
0.000
avatar

Sent 0.1 PGM - 0.1 LVL- 1 STARBITS - 0.05 DEC - 1 SBT - 0.1 THG - 0.000001 SQM - 0.1 BUDS - 0.01 WOO - 0.005 SCRAP - 0.001 INK tokens

remaining commands 9

BUY AND STAKE THE PGM TO SEND A LOT OF TOKENS!

The tokens that the command sends are: 0.1 PGM-0.1 LVL-0.1 THGAMING-0.05 DEC-15 SBT-1 STARBITS-[0.00000001 BTC (SWAP.BTC) only if you have 2500 PGM in stake or more ]

5000 PGM IN STAKE = 2x rewards!

image.png
Discord image.png

Support the curation account @ pgm-curator with a delegation 10 HP - 50 HP - 100 HP - 500 HP - 1000 HP

Get potential votes from @ pgm-curator by paying in PGM, here is a guide

I'm a bot, if you want a hand ask @ zottone444


0
0
0.000
avatar

The Italian "whale oil" community has shrunk in size in the last year. The Italian "whale oil" community has shrunk in size in the last year. Hive has made -25% in the last year. Things for this project don't seem to be going well compared to other Alt Coin projects.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Heya! Glad to hear you've identified user growth as an issue. It's something I think about a lot as well. I'm wondering if you could take a look at what I've put together for the UNHIDE project: https://inleo.io/@jfuji/an-overview-of-the-unhide-hive-project

Including DHF reform, it looks at several aspects of growth, including onboarding, marketing, anti-abuse, and exchange listings. I realize this article touches on SEO (marketing), so I'd be curious of what you think of the other areas.

UNHIDE is in early phases and right now I'm just looking for feedback on the two lists I've made (they're linked in the post's TL;DR, but I have a feeling the post won't be too long for you haha).

Cheers!
!PIZZA

0
0
0.000
avatar

I will take a look and let you know.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Thank you! Appreciate it :)

0
0
0.000
avatar

I used this post to test https://www.sociotrackr.live. :-)

image.png

0
0
0.000
avatar

I hear about the project and did a little bit of testing. I primarily write as a hobby. I won't be changing any of my writing. On the other hand I could see how more audience focused authors could use SentiTrack as a useful form of feedback.

0
0
0.000
avatar

They are part of a hackathon. That's how I found them

0
0
0.000
avatar

I found it when @arcange reblogged the prototype announcement. I am very happy to see hackathons on HIVE. We very much need more developers (maybe even more than new users). Good DAPPs can onboard users in large amounts. @splinterlands was the best example.

0
0
0.000
avatar

Hi @vimukthi, 2 months have passed since your last post. Are you going to use HIVE less and less? Which other crypto social do you use the most?

0
0
0.000
avatar

HIVE is still the primary blockchain I use. I have not found anything better. I have not invested in HIVE for a long time. I let the author + curation rewards accumulate in the account. Even most of my HIVE Power is delegated to @leo.voter to earn LEO (which doubled the price recently). At the moment, @splinterlands makes up the largest part of my portfolio (SPS, Cards, Land etc. combined).
!PIZZA
!LUV
!CTP

0
0
0.000