Publish0x started with the ambition to be the crypto community publishing platform. But although the crypto market had a great first quarter, the publishing platform for the community didn't go that well. Last month was the worst of the past 12-month period.
New users
Since you don't need to sign up for just to read posts, users are signing up for one reason only: to make some money. For the last quarter of 2020, Publish0x got 45,551 new users. With Bitcoin and the crypto market booming during the first quarter of this year, you would expect the same to happen to this platform. Although new users kept signing up, it wasn't the boom you would expect; only 58,112 new users signed up. The crypto market continued booming for a good part of the second quarter, and new users were signing up at around the same pace (56,839). With the crypto market going under during the last (third) quarter, so did new user sign-ups; just 40,111 new users signed up - fewer even than the last quarter of 2020.
Posts and tips
Users need to read posts to offer tips. Fresh content is the livelihood of any publishing platform. 23,903 posts were published in the last quarter of 2020, with 2,909,159 tips offered (121.7 tips/post on average). First quarter of the year had 26,260 new posts, bringing in 3,605,765 tips (137.3 tips/post on average). Things started looking bad during the second quarter of the year, with only 23,624 posts that generated 3,779,287 tips (160 tips/post on average), thanks to new user sign-ups. With the disastrous decision to not only cut-off Ethereum from tipping, but also cutting tips to half, in the last (third) quarter, both fresh content and tips have gone south. 15,890 new posts were published, generating 2,658,915 tips (167.3 tips/post on average).
Keep in mind that the tips/post ratio for the lifetime of the platform is at 125.3
Tips and new users
Many authors believe that getting more followers with each new post is a great way to secure audience for their upcoming posts. In reality though, this doesn't work like you would expect. Very few of those signing up are frequent readers.
Let's do the math.
We know that each user is limited to 5 tips per day, or roughly 450 tips per quarter. Users signed up in the last quarter of 2020, would have generated some 20,497,950 tips during the first quarter of this year, even with zero new users signing up, and past users had abandoned the platform. Compare that to the 3,605,765 tips generated during the first quarter of the year, and you get 17.6% realization of the earnings potential. Things would look much worse with new users signing up during the first quarter of the year, and returning users from past quarters. Fast forward to the third quarter. New users alone signed up during the second quarter, could generate 25,577,550 tips during the third quarter. All active users though generated 2,658,915 tips, or 10.4% of the earnings potential new users alone would have.
So, how many real tipping users does Publish0x have? We can only speculate. Even if those 2.6 million tips were offered at a rate of 1 tip per user, per day, that would be 29,543 active users per day, at best. In reality, this number should be divided by 3, to offer you the maximum tips potential per post. That's around 9,848 tips, or roughly $10. This is confirmed by the earnings of the most tipped post for September, that brought about $8 to its author. Most posts though will keep earning you about 16-17 cents each.
Needless to say that with the latest database issues the platform is facing, views and tips will go further down, if the team does not decide to do something.
Does it worth the effort?
