Philippines is still in its infancy in terms of growth in Steemit. The first #philippines tag was seen in July of 2016. There was also only a handful of Filipino Steemians at that point. The growth rate however is tremendous, and I personally believe that we are just getting started in the path of both growing the Philippine user-based and content creation maturity. In this contribution I aim to visually present the growth rate of the Steemit Philippines community with the use of three specific tags which are known to be commonly used by Filipino Steemians. I will present the data-points showing both the number of posts, and the corresponding total rewards for #philippines, #teamphilippines, and #steemph tags.
The chart above shows a general uptrend in terms of reward payout for the three earlier mentioned Philippines related tags. There's a couple of anomalies in this chart and the below bullet points aim to clarify those.
- The spike in September 2016 was driven by a post from an early adaptor - aizensou where the author featured a work of a Filipino Steemian juvyjabian. The post got a total_payout_value of 523.3.
- In August 2017 the community started showing overwhelming support to cryptopie; a Filipino Steemian who is a dialysis patient now with leonthiasis.
- September 2017 is a pivotal month for the Steemit Philippines community when the post using the three tags rose from 509 in August - to 1076 in September.
Taking those three points out the chart would have shown a perfect up-trend. I was searching for some concrete data to support the dip in the November 2017 total_payout_value, but all I can think of is that it may be due to some of our brightest Filipino content creators spending more time to contribute work to utopian.io. This would have meant that their post will not always have the three tags being studied in this analysis.
Delimitation
This analysis will present the distribution and trend related to post count and total_payout_value of #philippines, #teamphilippines, and #steemph category. The data will only be captured then if any of those was used as the primay tag. The analysis will also not filter the data by author to determine if he/she is a Filipino or based in the Philippines.
The analysis will only capture the data for the posts where the tags were used and will filter out comments in calculating the count of posts, and total_payout_value.
I used arcange's Steem SQL Public Database to acquire the data-points related to usage of tags from the Comment table.
Methodology
Having done earlier contribution using the Comment table, I know that the data is quite huge. I extracted the data related to each of the tags that are subjects of this analysis by running these SQL queries:
SELECT *
FROM Comments (NOLOCK)
WHERE category in ('philippines')
SELECT *
FROM Comments (NOLOCK)
WHERE category in ('teamphilippines')
SELECT *
FROM Comments (NOLOCK)
WHERE category in ('steemph')
To get the month and year date format from default date time format, I used =TEXT(timestamp,"mmm-yyyy") in excel
I removed the comments by running the =RIGHT(Text,Number of Characters) formula in excel and filtered out the result beginning with re-.
I then plotted the data-points in an excel spreadsheet to create the charts and visually present the data.
Please note that the December values used in this analysis were extrapolated based on the 28 days in December when the data is available. The projected end of the month values were calculated by diving the sum of the 28 days by 28, then multiplying that by 31 (total number of days in December)
The Analysis
I already mentioned about the generally uptrend movement of the total_payout_value for all the three tag summed up together. The chart below shows the distribution of the total_payout_value between the three tags.
There is some history to these three tags however that a simplistic chart will not capture. In the chart below for example, you would see that #philippines has been used since July 2016, while #teamphilippines was first seen in June 2017, and #steemph only started to be used in August 2017.
The chart below shows how the support is evolving in favor of the #steemph tag bewteen August to December 2017.
Steemit Philippines who is supporting the #steemph tag is managing a discord server with nearly 500 members, supported by witnesses and whales sympathetic of their cause to drive further growth of Steem in the Philippines both in terms of user-base and content creation.
The next two charts will show how the #steemph tag have almost fully overtaken the previous share of total_payout_value from #teamphilippines tag between August and December of 2017.
Conclusion
The data presented in this analysis shows how #steemph is gaining in terms of both usage and support. However, the tag #philippines still seems to be the preference for most Filipino Steemians for obvious reasons of pride of being from the Philippines. The use of #philippines is in fact encouraged by Steemit Philippines and is a target for their curation effort. vallesleoruther's Philippines Steem Stats capture 724 active users from the Philippines and nearly 500 of those are in #steemph including vallesleoruther himself.
The growth of the Philippine-based Steemit users may create other communities and drive introduction of new Philippine related tags. In fact we have already started seeing this happen in small scales. #philippines will without a doubt continue to lead as the key identity tags for Philippine-based content creators, and with continuous effort towards promotion and reaching out to the community, #steemph is likely to maintain its current position.
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors