If I understood the graph well, there were 172,068 active users for this month. Here is the link for it.
I remember the time I came to Steemit. I was this much away from buying my own domain on wordpress to blog. To write my stories/poems or make the daily blogs that I want to, when I came across Steemit. It seemed perfect to me then as my main idea was to put the stories that I want to write out into the world and have people read them, considering the active users who might be on the site regularly seemed a great idea to me & the idea of getting paid through upvotes seemed liked an added advantage.