NEAR Monthly Active Users
What are monthly active users (MAU)?
Monthly active users (MAU) are the number of unique users who engage with a product or a website within the last month. Companies usually track monthly active users by using a unique identifier such as a user ID, a username, or an email address. How a company defines an “active user” can vary. Because of this, monthly active users is often analyzed in relation to daily active users (DAU) to gain more meaningful insight into how customers are engaging with a product. Tracking monthly active users can be particularly useful to forecast customer churn and respond to potential issues proactively.
Pros and cons of using monthly active users as a KPI
As you could have probably guessed, the truth behind whether the metric is a very important one or a completely useless one, lies somewhere in the middle. There is some useful at-a-glance information that can be gleaned from your monthly active user count. The key is understanding exactly what the useful bits are and ignoring the rest. Let's take a look at what you can learn and when you shouldn't pay too much attention.
Pros
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Reflects user growth and business health : When people tell you how important measuring MAU is delete, this is what they will be talking about. If your number of monthly active users is going up every month, then your business is growing. If it is going down, then you are doing something wrong. Well, maybe. As we'll see later, this isn't always the case. Without a deeper dive into your metrics, you can't be exactly sure what is going on. In general though, MAU is great as an overall health indicator. Numbers going up is good, numbers going down is bad. You'll need to look deeper to fully understand why the numbers are moving and how good or bad it is, but MAU tells you that you need to look for something right at a glance.
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More Informative than overall users : Instead of monthly active users, some businesses will simply look at their total userbase as a KPI. This is even less effective. If you have thousands of users, but none of them ever use your product, then you are probably going to lose those customers at some point. In fact, with those numbers, there's likely a high churn rate and subsequent acquisition to make up for it, which makes for a longer payback period. With numbers that extreme, the problem will be obvious in other metrics, such as churn. In normal cases, not knowing how many of your users actually use the product leaves a lot of questions about how happy your customers are.
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Easy to calculate : Once you've decided how you want to define an active user, calculating the metric is very easy. Depending on your definition, you likely do not even need any special analytics tools in order to do so. This is the kind of thing that can very easily be built right into your existing login system or tracked with basic analytics services such as Google Analytics.
Cons
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No uniform definition of the metric : As we've already mentioned, different people will define an active user in different ways. If you decide that the average user logs into your site five times in a month and use that as your definition of an average user, but a competitor decides to count anyone who logs in at least once per month, then you have two competing definitions of the term. This makes it really hard to compare the metric across companies and means that when you see the metric mentioned, it is all but useless unless they also mention how they define it.
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May not reflect real user activity : When you use a basic metric to define your active user, you are not giving yourself very much information about whether or not the users are actually using anything. Someone that pops into your site, or opens the product for a couple of seconds for some quick errand and leaves, is much different than someone who actually uses the product for its intended purpose and is productive with it. For this reason, defining an active user by something meaningful, unsurprisingly, makes it a much more meaningful metric. In this case, your numbers will be smaller and less impressive to outsiders, but will give you a much better idea of who is actually using your product. [Source]
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NEAR is a decentralized development platform that uses a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism and will eventually feature a sharded architecture to scale transaction throughput. Its block generation scheme is called Doomslug and its proposed sharding design is dubbed Nightshade. These technologies will work together to scale the network and minimize congestion. NEAR has also been designed to be developer and user-friendly as it features a few key innovations to accelerate the application development and user-onboarding processes. The NEAR blockchain was created and developed by the NEAR Foundation. Its mainnet went live in April 2020, and network validators voted to unlock token transfers in October 2020. NEAR's bridge to Ethereum (called the Rainbow Bridge) launched in March 2021. [Source]
Aurora is a solution, that allows to execute Ethereum contracts in a more performant environment—NEAR blockchain, a modern layer-1 blockchain which is fast (2-3 second transaction finalization), scalable, and carbon neutral. Aurora is an Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) implemented as a smart contract on NEAR Protocol. We are here to help scale Ethereum ecosystem for developers to operate their apps on an Ethereum-compatible, high-throughput, scalable, and future-safe platform, with low transaction costs for their users.
Aurora provides the Ethereum 1.0 development experience, with layer-2-like speed and scalability. If you are an Ethereum developer, getting started on Aurora is as easy as changing the RPC endpoint you interact with. [Source: Aurora Docs]
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