Topic: Is this forum not afraid about it's demise? (Read 917 times)

thats not what matters to the organics,

Ultimately this forum has what the other forums will never have. It has almost 10 years of history entwined through the forum. It is not something that you can replicate or replace. This is where it happened, when it happened.

Traffic will always be up and down and will correlate with the price falling/spiking and excitement (or lack thereof) in the media, but I don't see why losing traffic would be an issue either. I'd rather there be less people here especially if those that left only care about bitcoin when there's something in it for them or they can earn via posting. I doubt theymos really cares either as he's seemingly not that interested in monetising the forum and that's all that traffic really matters for most. As long as there's enough money coming in to cover outgoings then it shouldn't be an issue, but with the amount of funds the forum has in reserves then that's probably not much of a concern either.

during the 2017 bubble?

you can see the same sort of decline in google trends data for "bitcoin":



it's reflective of the overall post-bubble decline in interest in bitcoin. be patient---it took a long time for the market to get hyped again after the 2015 bottom. there's no reason the 2018 bottom would be any different.

I think BTCT will be the better forum in the short-term, middle-term and for the long haul .....

There will always be competitors, just like BTC always have some sh*tcoins to deal with....

I would rather have 3.1 million constant users of the forum rather than 27 million more people who just got interested of Bitcoin because of its hype. Because lets face it those 27 million viewers of Bitcointalk are just here because of the bull run in 2017 and most of them here posted topics about how they will earn and how they will be rich with Bitcoin and then after that when the crash begin they are mostly likely the ones who became nocoiners at the end since they have bought Bitcoin with no proper plan. That number is just noise and practically not here because they are interested with Bitcoin but rather more interested in earning from it.

The statistic I'm interested in is how many times we've had this topic over the years.  It feels like it comes up fairly often, but maybe I'm just showing my age.  Apparently this place has always been dying, even though it clearly isn't.

We'll have to start a 'bitcointalk obituaries' to go along with the regular 'bitcoin obituaries'.  

I do not take it this way and also they are not mad to waste their money to fund the spammers. Their goal is to make the forum popular and make it in a position where they can get the signature campaigns which will automatically keep the spammers posters busy.

Yeah they are many shitcoins in yobit and they can get good bounties advertisement too. When i last visited there were no ranks but now they have introduced ranks there too. They are eyeing something big which we may not realize now.

It's only the money they spend for encouraging users to post in their forum. They are paying much more money to bitcointalk signature campaign participants .
Once they stop paying people for posting in their forum, the number of daily posts will significantly decrease.
Anyway, cryptotalk is a new website and they normally need advertisement. Their advertisement on bitcointalk can be effective as it makes many people know them. We don't know what will happen in future. They may be able to attract good users. But I don't know how they treat spammers in their forum. If they pay spammers, they harm their forum.

thats what you want everyone to believe.

thats what the bitcoin whales want everyone to believe.

It does not seems to slow down much. New members per day will decrease naturally but the main thing is that posts per day is stable. And how much cryptotalk is spending to keep their forum alive. Below is the rough estimate

Pay per Post = 1000 Sat

Daily Posts: 6387 * 1000 = 0.06387000 BTC  approx 510$ paying daily

Total Posts: 84384 * 1000= 0.84384000 BTC  approx 6,724$  has been spend so far in approx 15 days

Going over data Archived data (http://archive.fo/https://cryptotalk.org/), Cryptotalk seems to be slowing down a bit:



New members per day was 165 on average between 10/10/2019 and today, whilst being of 385 on the prior six day window. Posts per day is stable, but that is due likely to the added new members that manage to keep the numbers at the same rate (Bitcointalk is currently on 22K new accounts per month, although bots to hit Bitcointalk probably a fair share more).

The above is not too meaningful really, as there are only a too few data points to conclude anything yet, but it does seem point to it not being easy to keep a steady flow of people enrolling on a new forum, even if paid to do so.

Keep in mind in cryto currencies, the first one is the the Bitcoin and the rest are all the altcoins.
Similarly, In crypto forums, No forum can compete or come close to give any competition to bitcointalk. You can combine all the other crypto forums and you will find this forum traffic and interest is far beyond the combination of all others.

No other forum has our legendary member Mr Satoshi except bitcointalk! So that itself makes this place original and other forums just like a sub branch no matter their page views or activity. But yeah, there should be more healthy competition

With the funding they're willing to put into advertising, and a long term campaign running on this forum will likely mean they will be a big forum, but a competitor? Depends on how you view it. If you're talking in terms of traffic then they might be a competitor, but quite frankly Bitcointalk.org is my home, and I imagine a lot of other users consider this their home away from home. Its not just a forum anymore, and is something which brings out real passion from its users.

If you compare the history, and passion from its users then Bitcointalk.org will always be the top dog in my eyes, and I'm not going to be using any other. Hell, I don't even use Reddit.

Correlation is not causation. Volume has been chugging along and any small spikes are most likely just a higher granularity in the graph. If you look at the entries other than those few days then you see that they've just made large overarching lines.

It's not completely accurate, since traffic could remain stagnant or even fall, yet rank could still increase. All you can sufficiently say is that their rank increases when their rank increases: a tautology.

No matter how you want to redefine it, it will eventually crawl back to being

rank increase |=| rank increase

Thank you DdmrDdmr for the reply.


Look at top of the chart. It says " In global internet traffic and engagement... "
So, Doesn't this mean that the visitors from all over the world have been considered?
Also, Alexa shows the visitors by country: (USA: 13.5%, India: 13%, Brazil: 8.9%). So, I guess all the countries are considered not only USA.


I completely understand you. A website rank does depend on traffic of other websites too.
But, when a website rank increases 500 in a day, can't we say that " The website traffic has been increased." ?
I think it's unlikely that traffic of 500 websites decreases at the same time.  

Money can buy anything, including people

It is also ironic, people who say cryptotalk.org won't become a big forum are the same guys who post in this forum only for those free sats. 

Alexa, as most of the traffic measuring sites, needs to be interpreted with caution. The information they show can be a symptom of something, but they do not resolve the cause which is normally multidimensional, and not down to a single factor.

The Alexa chart is showing data delimited to the USA (not worldwide, unless someone has credentials to access and unlock information at other geographical levels).
Each datapoint on the chart is calculated as follows (see https://blog.alexa.com/improving-your-alexa-rank):

As per the above definition, your rank can decrease:
a)   Because a given site receives less visits and/or page view.
b)   Because other sites receive more visits and/or page views.
The rank is really expressed in terms of “global internet engagement”. That is, it is not contextualized to related or comparable internet sites, but rather to all internet sites.

Now one would no doubt prefer to see the graphic the other way round (an upward trend, and not a downward one), but the issue with the chart is that we cannot discern how much is due to “a”, and how much to “b”. If a bunch of other non-related sites have upped their visits and/or page views, that can cause quite a shift in the ranking.

Having said all that, I rather much like some of the information that @Coin-1 sums up on this thread: [Chart] Bitcointalk statistics on impression counts for ads. Specifically, the Unique IP and Unique logged-in charts, which place us back in 2017 metrics, but that represent endogenous data which is not influenced in the reading by the environment (such as happens on the Alexa chart).

I follow the post count (see https://public.tableau.com/shared/5G8SFTFN7?:display_count=yes&:origin=viz_share_link), but prefer the above information gathered by @Coin-1 if I had to choose the best first level objective metric.

This might be the effect of Yobit signature campaign.


Source: https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/bitcointalk.org

The traffic of bitcointalk was declining until a week ago. Is this due to Yobit signature campaign?

I think it is about this thread : Bitcointalk.org did it into the big cryptomedia today

It is strange for someone who has extremely negative views toward Bitcoin, at the same time shows concern for this forum. It is actually very simple to conclude why there is currently less traffic and less active users - the price of BTC is not so high, many members get permabanned and bounty hunting is not profitable as before.

The vast majority view this forum as a source of income, they do not spend time here because they are interested in the future of cryptocurrency or to spend time with other users. This new signature campaign has certainly improved the forum stats, so we don't have to worry about the future of the forum, YoBit will save us

New and old projects scramble to advertise themselves on the bitcointalk forum, who's not aware that this is one place you can reach a large amount of people and create some traffic for yourself, if the forum gets all this attention, how then can it go advertising itself elsewhere.

Advertisements are for traffic, to attract people to get involved,if the forum is really in need of such traffic as to advertise on other platforms, it then wouldn't ban users, nuke them, ban spam campaigns or even ever suggest a signature ban.

Well said, just to add some more important observation. If you observe, the forum has never engaged in any sort of advertisement to expose the forum to the general public yet it gets this number of audiences (that on it's on, is an achievement not many sites can burst off). A major contribution to the decline in forum visitors is just as a result of the current market conditions of cryptocurrencies in general.

Once the market returns to a favourable status (bull market), the media, new projects etc will get back to the usual of trying to cash in on the hype associated with the industry as a result bring about new and more audience to the forum since the forum indirectly profit from the success of the industry. More enthusiast, Investors, speculators etc = more forum audience (one way or the other).

PS: don't forget, the forum is a platform to connect bitcoin (cryptocurrency) enthusiast and not a hunting ground for audience for her selfish, financial needs.

I agree. It is a crypto based cycle. Just look at the comparison between binance.com and bitcointalk.org






Source: https://www.similarweb.com

You don't need to worry about it, even though we're losing some users we still have someone like Vod, Suchmoon, LoyceV, and the others. these guys are the pillars of this forum. without them, these whole things might already end years ago. and also they don't have someone supercomputer brain like DdmrDdmr, they won't even come close to the rank of this forum.

Lets assume that those figures are correct, which they definitely aren't, but lets assume just for arguments sake. I don't know about you guys. but I would much rather a tight knitted community than a community run by the Bitcoin price, spamming the forum, and covered in alternate accounts trying to earn a quick buck now the Bitcoin price is up.

This forum in my opinion has been vital to providing new comers with information about Bitcoin, and has helped Bitcoin grow to where it is. Sure, there's rules on this forum to prevent it from being total chaos, but I think everyone can admit that freedom of speech is encouraged here, and the restrictions in place are always heavily considered before being implemented. Theymos has time, and time again decided to not implement something which limits users to an extent which he thinks effects users unfairly.

Look at the community projects which have been developed around this forum also. Vod, DmdrDmdr, and LoyceV have all developed things relating to the forum out of passion. That's the thing with this forum though users aren't here just because its the most popular Bitcoin forum, but because they're passionate about the forum, and the history of it.

 Promoting BTT on Ver's forum will only benefit Ver's forum. Bcash forum's alexa rank will be climbing up while BTT is going to gain nothing. The amount of users we will be attracting there is much less than what we'll be losing to them.

Think it like the osmosis. From high concentration to low concentration. People act like this too.

Cryptotalk is mainly relying on that mechanism. The difference is they pay people to induce it.

Edit: thinking now, altcoins also work the same way. Stealing people from btc just like btc stole people from FIAT&Gold.

Unless traffic drops below the "millions," I don't think we have anything to worry about. I agree with the previous posts though that the daily/monthly views are a function of the overall market conditions and sentiment. Looking forward to the coming months!

Why would this place be afraid? Even if traffic died down a bit, those people whom contribute to the community wouldn't be the ones leaving. Besides, bitcointalk still has its campaign/bounty forum. I doubt people would leave it since it's basically money for your services in posting. Those that left would probably people who got tired of shit posting and those that stayed were those whom were engaged in learning while doing their bounties.

It is for sure that SimilarWeb's Data is not 100% accurate, this type of third-party platforms are just used to get a rough estimate of traffic data and this data varies platforms to platforms.

As an example, see the image below. It is from SeoQuake and the results in both platforms are different.



One thing to notice that the bounce rate is high in both platforms which is I'm very much disagreed to.

Maybe connecting Google Analytics account with SimilarWeb can represent better data publicly? I believe Google is one of the best trackers out there.

I didn't take price into account.    I just guesstimated the ratio of page views per online user and applied it to today.

The highest that archive.org recorded bitcointalk showing was on 2017/11/24, 12647 online users: https://web.archive.org/web/20171124145213/https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats

It was close to the peak of BTC price and at the height of the altcoin craze, spam was also a bigger problem than now in the pre-merit system times.

The forum is never destroyed, the Forum does not expect anything certain, precisely the people who come here will be destroyed, if they cannot control themselves in looking for money, carelessness, forgery, fraud.
The proof is that here, every day is increasing and growing, New account want to enter.

People are never bored with money, for example in the Cryptotalk campaign.
How many people slam every day and it does not decrease people want to find money for credit installments, who sleep a long time too wake up in a dream for the sake of personal credit installments.

That's just one campaign that was developed like yobit in this forum, thousands of accounts appear, try to imagine if a campaign like yobit is developed in this forum 5 to 10 campaigns, maybe even the dead join create accounts for money to buy hell.

Take it easy it never happened.

That thin blue line, before the first spike, were the original users that didn't care about the price.

Those are the users that should get the anniversary coins.  


Bitcointalk would have about 14,000 viewers based on current Page View numbers and the past online visitors, which it no longer records.  :/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=stats

bitcointalk had its highest amount of viewers at around 7000 in april 2013
cryptotalk had its highest amount of viewers at 1545 just 5 hours ago.

Number of Bitcointalk visitors is directly related with Bitcoin price. So, it's normal thing that there is much less visitors here than in 2017 for example.
And smaller number of forum users isn't always a bad thing. Remember what was going here back in 2017 - it was almost impossible to use forum due to incredible quanity of spam. Lot of things changed into positive side since then - merit system, wave of bans and etc - it helped to clean up forum. Bounties is pretty much dead thing now - it also attract less number of visitors to forum.

That drop in number of visitors is completely normal.
Look at the chart below
The chart shows how much "Bitcoin" has been searched on "Google" over the time. Number of searches has been decreased by 90%. There is a same trend for number of visits of Crypto-related websites.

Source: https://trends.google.com/

@KingScorpio

Such websites are well known from webmasters to be only wrong. It's like Alexa rank, for entertainment only. You also perfectly know it's somehow related to the cryptocurrency trend/interest. You can't expect to see the same as back in 2017.

Cryptotalk? You make me laugh. The only reason they get the few users there are it is because they get paid as someone said. And seeing the huge crap they post here already, I can't imagine how it goes there.

Maybe the "30 million" visits were an anomaly (bullrun, bots, signature campaigns, etc...) and now the 3 million visits are more normal ? What were the figures before the bullrun of 2017 ?


Do nothing and enjoy the calm before the next bullrun ?

Most failed models of post incentives -> new users result in posts up to the quality that you pay for and since most of the time, the payment incentives are extremely small just due to common pragmatism, you will get pretty piss-poor posts.

The previous peak saw 3 538 524 users. (July 10 2019, $13 000).
One of the local bubbles saw 5 220 637 users. (July 29 2018, $8 200).
The ATH peak saw 4 121 946 users. (Dec 17 2019, $20 000).

The current numbers are 3 350 806... not that bad, comparatively.

The forum is fueled by the members and most of the activities that go on is unregulated (except for spam and plagiarism). Hence the administrators can technically not do anything about the drop in activity or views.

The forum also favours quality above quantity, the enhanced newbie restriction would surely have reduced the number of daily visitors, as it took away the incentive for many members to post, for those unwilling to make an effort to earn merits.


Bitcointalk is a neutral forum AFAIK. The alternate forum you suggested uses incentive to attract users. And in my experience in community management, that only lasts as long as you can sustain it. Organic growth is always the best option.

SimilarWeb numbers are BS and have been previously debunked in another thread started by the OP, I just can't be bothered to find it. You can refer to ad stats for a more accurate trend:

https://bitcointalk.org/adrotate.php?adstats

There had been crypto forums before cryptotalk and all of them failed. I won't be surprise they'd also fail. They should just promote yobit exchange directly instead.

I don't know if that's irony or not, but I do remember a couple of years ago someone here tried to start up a forum where members would get paid to post there.  They even hired moderators from bitcointalk--but the thing turned out to be not only a scam, since nobody got paid, but the forum got zero traffic.  The posts that members there did make were god-awful shitposts.  Just what you'd expect from a new forum that skims the dried up fecal matter from the bottom of this forum.

Interesting to see that most traffic is coming from Russia lately.  And I highly doubt bitcointalk is in trouble.  I'd like to ask OP when the forum was getting 30 million views per month.  That was probably in 2017?  If so, that makes sense.  People tend to flock here when the price of bitcoin does its little firecracker act and starts shooting towards new all-time highs, because then the shitposters start really getting interested in earning via bounties and whatnot.  And when bitcoin is down, like it is now, fewer people come here.

OK, that's basically what I was trying to say.  You beat me to it.

Probably it would piss off Ver and give him something to make another youtube video about, and get us nothing because whoever posts on forum.bitcoin.com is already paid to do so. Just go there and check out bitcoin discussion. I just did and there were literally 5 fresh threads. Then switch to bitcointalk and the same bitcoin discussion has over 60 threads with recent posts. Maybe if we did that on reddit the results would be better, but whoever posts for those pennies they pay on cryptotalk is not going to come up with anything unique. They chose to buy traffic whatever it may be and got a crowd of shitposters from Africa. Good job Yobit!

Check those numbers again next bull run. It's just a healthy cycle.
 

Cryptotalk is PAYING to promote itself on THIS forum (and is also paying, albeit a lot less, to post on their own forum). Not to mention it's Yobit's propaganda tool.

Maybe bitcointalk should pay to promote itself on Ver's forum. I wonder how that would go.

Bitcointalk.org only gets nowadays 3.1 million viewers thats actually nothing compared with it once had per month (over 30 milion)



what are your plans to reverse this?

alternative more neutral cryptoforums are rising in their viewer numbers,
like cryptotalk.org

regards