Have you noticed something lately? No matter how many posts you tip, or how many readers each of your posts has, your incentives have significantly declined over the past few days - although the decline has started weeks ago. Here are the numbers - and numbers don't lie.
At the end of March, readers had been generating about 19,000 tips per day (18,854 tips per average day, for the week ended on March 29). Each tip was earning in total some 1.89-1.90 cents, on average.
By April 12th, daily tips were increased by some 1,000-2,000 (despite a growth of about 5,000 users), with tips per average day for the week ended on April 12, be at 20,400. Total tips for that week though earned users $2,414, or $80 lower than the week ended on March 29. The average tip value dropped to 1.58 cents on April 12th.
And then, tips paid in Loopring were introduced.
On April 17th, 24,432 tips were generated, earning Publish0x users $361 and some cents. At the end of that week (April 19) Publish0x welcomed some 6,000 new users, and you would expect more tips to be generated. Average number of tips per day went up to 23,200 or about 3,000 more tips than the week before that. A little less than 20,000 more tips than the week before. Users didn't earn more though. Despite the additional 20,000 tips, users were compensated some $65 less than the previous week ($2,352 vs. $ 2,415). Average tip value for the week, dropped to 1.45 cents.
And we come to last week, that added some 3,000 fresh users. You would expect tips to go up by at least 1,500 tips per average day. Right? Wrong! Despite the 3,000 fresh users, fewer tips were generated. Some 14,000 tips per average day - that's nearly half of the tips you would expect, given the additional users. Average tip value for the week? Just 1.28 cents. Even lower for the day of Sunday April 26th (1.16 cents per average tip).
From March 30th to April 26th, Publish0x added just over 14,650 new users. Even if each and every one of them was generating just one tip per day, we should have gone from 18,750 tips on March 29th to over 33,000 tips on April 26th. How many tips were generated on April 26th? Just 24,050 - or 5,300 more tips.
We bet though, that new users are not offering just one tip per day. They keep tipping until the first payout is done - only to discover that Looprings they earned, need some 10% in gas fees in order to be converted in something more useful (e.g. Ethereum) - and that is if they don't select to go to the Loopring DEX. Even if they make it to payout, that is. With average tip at 1.16 cents in total, even at 80% kept for the reader, that would be 0.93 cents - or 54 tips until payout. Given the limitations posed by Publish0x rules, that would be 10 days. But there is more. Not all tips are generated in LRC, oh no! Only half of them are. The rest are generated in DAI or BAT. Which leads to 20 days of reading and tipping, for a measly 40 cents (2 cents per day) net - DAI and BAT would take more than 2 months to be paid out.
Given that the average user would exhaust his/her daily tips, daily active users are some 12,000 people. Not 88,000 - which is the total number of registered users. Not even 22,000.
Publish0x has huge user retention issues. And the issues have nothing to do with authors, nor readers. With average tip value going down the hole (close to 40% down compared to end of March), only desperate readers will keep coming back for more.
If that's the kind of users the team would like to have, so be it!
