PLEASE NOTE: This is not a rant post. It is written out of respect for the Publish0x team, and the user point of view on where they should direct their efforts.

Publish0x is indeed a great blogging platform. Although it's not offering many options on presentation of what you write (e.g. there is only one layout), in blogs it's the content that matters most, not the presentation.

Tipping system is simple for both authors and readers, and it should be used as a case study for UI/UX courses. Payout limit might be a pain in the neck sometimes, especially for readers, but I guess this is more of a business decision, rather than a UX one.

Where things start going wrong is on user acquisition and retention.

While there was some of an effort to get users on the platform for the first two and a half months of the year, things seem to return back to their normal pace: some 500-1000 users per week. Same happens with tips generated: platform is back to 33k-35k per month. Posts are following the same trend, but more intensively: for the week ended on March 22nd, only 384 posts were published, from 600-900 posts a week in December. This leads to just over 92 tips per post, when in December we had only 47 tips per post. If authors were as active as back in December, though, tips per post would be more or less at the same level. If the platform is adding users - even at a rate of 500-1000 per week - how tips generated are the same as in December, despite the 34,000 additional users? Maybe the answer is in how those new 34,000 users were acquired.

Let's compare active (tipping) users in the day/week/month level. In the most recent statistics, DAU were 3,863, WAU were 6,030, and MAU were 10,719. What should be alarming to the Publish0x team is the rate of active users to new users, which offers a hint about user (reader) retention. Starting at the big picture (month level), new users represent over 92% of the active. In the week level this drops to just over 33%, and in the day level, this drops to nearly 8%. A user (reader) retention point of close to 8% is not sustainable, because the team will have to keep finding ways (and probably incentives) bringing new users to the platform. And given the area of interest, this will start to be getting more difficult each passing day (as the numbers already show).

To our view, the key here is to revive registered but inactive users along with starting to display ads or sponsored posts in order to start generating some revenue for the platform.