If we look at the longer time periods, then it seems that the forum activity has stabilized on a relatively low level since late 2022.
This can be seen also positive: I feel that since 2-3 years most subforums have become readable again. For example, in "Bitcoin Discussion" or "Economics" in 2017-20/21 you were lucky if you found a single interesting thread on the first page. Now while there are still lots of "spam megathreads", there are some gems here and there, like the Mempool and LN Observers.
In general the evolution is not too bad, considering developments like the overall decline of forums versus newer forms of social media and communication in general (although I think this has stabilized somewhat in the last 5 years).
The ad stats linked by the OP are giving some interesting ideas around the general forums' evolution:
- first a slow growth, then in 2013/14 an unique user explosion up to >20000
- then a decline which lasted approximately until 2016, with a low of around 10000-12000 users
- then a massive growth, reaching the maximum of 115498 users in January 2018
- in 2018 a massive decline until 2019/20, reaching again the 10000 mark
- then a temporary new increase, but not reaching the maximum of 2017/18, up to around 20000 in late 2021
- and since then a decrease again, this time fastly falling to a level of 8000-10000, which is the order of magnitude we have now.
I think much has to do actually with the attention level in general on cryptocurrencies. We see that the maximum activity was always close to a marked Bitcoin ATH, and the minimums were in the early bull markets, when everybody is still bearish.
(I actually don't think we are still in this phase, this year perhaps the mixer ban did cost some activity, perhaps otherwise we could be at 12-13000 again).
But of course there are other factors too. The merit policy could have contributed to the extreme downtrend in logged-in users in 2018 (a 90% loss!), which is not only negative (see above, I think most of the people left in this era were shitposters, but there may have also been "OGs" leaving because they were annoyed by shitposters). But also the burst of the ICO wave surely has contributed.
What to do? I think to further stabilize and grow again a little bit, apart from a positive Bitcoin price evolution, a slight visual update would surely help, above all a better usability from mobile devices. I could imagine for example a CSS format for longposts, where you can chose to use a style which looks like a Medium post. So this could incentive people to link quality posts in other social media and drive new users into the forum.
PS: It is interesting that stats like the "Unique IPs from logged-out users" and "Impressions per slot" are growing. This means that for advertisers the forum could be becoming more attractive again.