Economically Active Users

Old metrics and terms are often applied to new sectors and industries at their outset since the language to properly describe the 'newness' of those sectors and industries simply doesn't exist yet.

Over time, however, as a new sector unfolds and people find their footing in it, new, more accurate terms and language develop to better describe the many new things that occur and take place within it.

For crypto, and Dapps in particular, I think that I might have stumbled upon the beginnings of a new engagement metric to describe the unique economic contributions and gains that Dapp users experience: Economically Active Users or EAUs for short.

Obviously the term is derivative of the commonly used DAU, WAU, and MAU metrics that attempts to analyze Active Users (i.e. those users that engage in some particularly meaningful action within a site or app) on daily, weekly, and monthly intervals that, in lieu of revenue, acts as a proxy for growth.

For Dapps like CryptoKitties or Cent, real live users are either contributing ETH, gaining ETH, or some combination of the two from day one. Even if revenue is being captured by this cohort of users, the contribution and gaining of value is a super significant metric to track on it's own, at least to me. Breaking this group of users out from traditional Active Users would provide a useful basis for many different comparisons.

One could track the percentage/conversion rate of Active Users to EAUs. Additionally, a standalone EAU metric would also help determine and track the average gains and contributions of users as well as the percentage growth of those gains and contributions of users on the Dapp.

Having such a clear view would make imbalances more apparent. For example, a ton of questions would start to flow if growth in EAU gains are outpacing EAU contributions relative to AU:EAU conversion on a Dapp, or if the contribution per EAU ratio remains small compared to the gains per EAU ratio.

From a product perspective, tracking Active Users, or those users who visit and engage in some meaningful action but gain zero economic value, against EAUs would be useful to see if previous assumptions placed on thresholds that limit reward payouts or subsidy distribution are too restrictive or not.

There is a lot more that needs to be fleshed out from this, and obviously Dapps that are able to track this metric should feel good that there is something that sets them apart from a traditional app, but I will leave this thought here, open ended, for now. Any feedback or criticism is more than welcome.