One of the great things about Steemit is that all the data is public and so we can know exactly how things are going. What the blockchain does not reveal is how it is doing as a web site. I love that Steemit is viewable by anyone and gets high ranking on Google. That means that a lot of people will get there even if they don't join up. That could at least get more people to know that Steemit exists.

You can get some general web stats from [Hypestat](http://steemit.com.hypestat.com/compare/bitlanders.com). I know it may not show the whole picture, but I've found it good to see trends. Steemit is still on the rise and gets good user engagement.

![Comparison to bitlanders](https://steevc.keybase.pub/steemit/2016-09-10Comparisontobitlanders.png)

I've done a comparison to [Bitlanders](http://www.bitlanders.com/). That's a site I used, but I never made much there and the engagement was not great. I think it's big in Asia, but the quality of content is low in my opinion. I've done a few posts about Steemit (and previously about Tsu) and got someone saying I complain too much about Bitlanders. Maybe it works for some people, but it's just not what I want. When I do go there I don't see much that's interesting. This is the quality of comments I got there.

![Bitlanders comments](https://steevc.keybase.pub/steemit/2016-09-10Bitlanderscomments.png)

Is Steemit more like [Medium](https://medium.com/). I've not been there much, but it also seems to be about posting longer articles. I don't think they pay writers. They do have [much more traffic](http://steemit.com.hypestat.com/compare/medium.com) (but lower per user) than Steemit, but I'm not seeing it in Google searches.

![Steemit vs Medium](https://steevc.keybase.pub/steemit/2016-09-10SteemitvsMedium.png)

[Minds](https://www.minds.com/) is another blogging site with [similar traffic](https://www.minds.com/) to Steemit, but again the views per user is low.

So Steemit does have competitors as a blogging platform and of course there are the big players like Blogger and Wordpress. It's just different. I get hardly any comments on my Blogger blogs, but I do here. That may be partly down to the possibility of getting paid. Steemit is a web minnow compared to the likes of Blogger, but it's still only a few months old. I think it has some hurdles in usability and user understanding, but it could be huge. Don't worry about the price of Steem. That's a distraction from the real value of this site.