Google+: 400 Million Registrations, 100 Million Monthly Active Users

http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/09/17/as-predicted-google-passes-400m-registered-users-now-100m-monthly-active-users/

by rkudeshi • 14 years ago

66 48 14 years ago

k3n3• 14 years ago

Yeah yeah, I'm an "active" G+ user, but all I've done in the past month is have my photos from my phone automatically uploaded to it (not shared, just for backup), and maybe shared a couple of things I saw on Google Reader, that nobody will likely see, because, well, google broke readers social interface.

waterlesscloud• 14 years ago

I wonder when they'll figure out that putting out numbers no one believes actually hurts their perception?

abraham3• 14 years ago

It sounds like you wouldn't be counted then since you didn't visit plus.google.com or actively use the mobile app.

ImprovedSilence2• 14 years ago

Perhaps, I didn't look at it that way. Do you think they track it by visits to plus.google.com, or by activity? (ie, my phone uploads a photo ever time a take a picture, or I "share" something via reader) You don't think those would count as visits to plus.google.com, as my google account communicates with plus? I get notifications in my gmail thingy every time a photo uploads as well. Also, I do probably visit at least once a month and scroll through my pics as well. I suppose it would be interesting to see what counts as a "visit" or "active".

Steko3• 14 years ago

Anyone who buys into the "G+ is a ghost town propped up by Gmail and Android numbers" theory will note that they literally just announced 500 million Android activations a few days ago. And you'd expect a good number of users are buying their second android phone.

GFischer4• 14 years ago

I don't understand your point.

I switched to Android, and so did everybody in my office, yet nobody feels compelled to use Google Plus.

Steko3• 14 years ago

Probably 95% of non-fork Android users create or already have a Google account at the time of activation. And probably 95% of the ones that don't end up making one because it's a requirement for the app store or gmail or whatever.

Now there's nothing wrong with that. There's not even anything wrong with defaulting G+ to "on".

What's "wrong" is to go around claiming G+ is some kind of amazing success story that's growing like wildfire. It'd be like Apple adding a new Ping checkbox to Apple id profiles that defaults to on and then claiming Ping has 400 million new users and is a runaway success.

GFischer4• 14 years ago

Those are nice numbers, but how is engagement?

I only visit Google+ because my admin didn't bother to block it, but nobody in my social circle uses it, so I only have it to follow some funny pictures, lifehacker and stuff (kind of a RSS feed).

Reminds me of Hotmail, which I check once a month or so, much like many people I know which still has an account, but I'm sure Microsoft counts me as "active", compared to Gmail which I check a zillion times a day.

OriginalSyn• 14 years ago

The way to properly use G+ is as a hybrid of Twitter and Facebook. I have few of my RL social circle (though it's growing) but I have tonnes of people I used to follow on twitter on there and found more through circle sharing. I have them categorized and throttled appropriately and I'm never lacking new things to read, watch or discuss on G+.

The new killer feature for me is the events. This weekend it was my friend's wedding and I made an event and invited my friends that were on G+, during the event your phone can optionally go into "party mode" which shares photos and video taken to the event page when the event ends your phone automatically stops sharing. Between the 8 or so that "attended" the event we gathered over 200 photos and a few videos, it was great. Showing people that feature convinced a few more to give G+ another, or first, shot.

arturadib4• 14 years ago

There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats, particularly the "active users" one.

To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet. There may be at most a few people who occasionally post to it, and recently I've seen many switch to Twitter.

Secondly, although not a perfect proxy, Google Trends shows an exponentially decaying trend that is hardly in line with their reported exponential growth:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c...

Here's a zoomed-in graph in the last 12 months clearly showing the decaying tail:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&c...

Let's compare for example with Twitter (~140-200M actives) in the last 12 months:

http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit...

Regardless of how you rationalize people searching for "twitter" vs. "google plus" as a proxy for active users, the decaying trend is clear. And it's hard to think of why the query "google plus" or "google+" would be 50-70 times less popular than "twitter" other than low the popularity of the service.

Of course none of this is hard proof, and it's possible that my circles are just not representative of the internet as a whole and that Google Trends is a fantastically erroneous proxy for popularity, but personally I believe they're using an unrealistically optimistic metric for actives.

redwood• 14 years ago

Active probably means one active use of a Google+ umbrella property (e.g. hangouts, youtube, etc)

tonfa• 14 years ago

According to the original plus post from Vic Gundotra, it means active use of mobile app or plus.google.com.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Be very careful of this one:

"To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet."

There is an interesting thing about G+ which hasn't "seeped in" to a lot of users, is that 'share with my circles' doesn't share with people who are following you but you don't have in your circles. To hit those people you need to share to 'public' (and yes there should be a share to followers which is less broad than public but that is only my opinion)

Consequently you don't get as much 'fire hose' effect as you do on say twitter. And the APIs that post to Google+ are still not available as far as I can tell (pls correct if this is mistaken!) and a lot of my Facebook feed is not real news so much as auto-generated stuff from other apps. My point being that 'seeing it as quiet' isn't a good measure of anything.

Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured out what G+ is, why search for it? And Google includes your G+ stuff in your search results (much to the dismay of many).

I suspect the better proxy is going to find referrals from links in a G+ post. How many links are sharing, how many links are being followed, how much traffic does it drive. That will be a better measure of its success I expect.

arturadib4• 14 years ago

> Then looking at searches is another poor proxy because once you've figured out what G+ is, why search for it?

Same applies to Twitter, so the comparison is fair.

mikeevans• 14 years ago

There's sort of a post API "available" (It's in developer preview): https://developers.google.com/+/history/

Basically an app can add stuff to a private queue, and then a user can go in and then approve to share them.

richardkeller• 14 years ago

Correlation != Causation. Fewer people searching for "Google Plus" as a search term may in fact mean the exact opposite to what you're suggesting: the service may have become popular enough that people know how to get to it without requiring a search. Certainly, for anyone who uses Google as a search engine, the "+You" link is only one click away.

Edit: Taking a closer look at the trends link you provided, the bulk of the traffic relating to Google Plus occurred in the first 3 months of it being announced, after which traffic has remained fairly constant. This suggests that the initial peak was an initial surge of people searching for "Google Plus" to try and find out more about it.

It's easy to try and gleam meaning from the search data, but you need to be careful in the interpretation. On the other hand, it's curious to note that "Facebook" has maintained an order of magnitude higher search traffic than "Google Plus", despite Facebook being globally well-known.

arturadib4• 14 years ago

The same can be said about Twitter, so the comparison is fair and the fact that their trends are opposite remains meaningful.

alexlitov• 14 years ago

Google Trends for G+, Twitter, Facebook http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twit...

camiller• 14 years ago

My G+ feed is noisy as hell. But I have a crapload of people with similar interests circled. Hundred of homebrewers and beer geeks in general. Another circle of photographers.

roc• 14 years ago

> "To begin with, as experienced by others here, my Google+ is extremely quiet."

But isn't that an advertised feature of google+? That you could 'friend' people, but then toss them in a [siberia] circle to keep their noise from cluttering up your feed? And similarly keep posts about your drinking vacation from being 'blabbed' to all your professional contacts?

It seems entirely possible that swaths of the social graph may have cut themselves off by pruning their circles down to the point that they were sharing to people who weren't listening to them and listening to people who weren't sharing with them.

Consider: When that co-worker from three jobs ago asks "does anyone ever use google+?" Would you really say "dude, I'm on there all the time. I've just got you in [siberia]"? It seems to me that most people would downplay whether/how often they use it.

kevinw• 14 years ago

I definitely agree with this sentiment. I work at a technology-focused software startup, and while we all have Google Plus accounts, it isn't a service that most of us use regularly. Given the fact that I've never even been "added to a circle" by someone who isn't part of a technology-focused university or company, it seems less likely that there are legitimate and massive (400M!) pockets of users floating around anywhere remotely close to my circle of acquaintances.

That said, I'm on the US East Coast, so I could easily have a biased viewpoint. Perhaps all the Google+ users are elsewhere in the world? Or perhaps the little Google+ notification bar at the top-right of the default Gmail interface counts as an impression for the purposes of this study?

filip01• 14 years ago

Could it possibly be that they count users of Youtube/Google Drive and other Google products as "active" Google Plus users? Something must indeed be deceptive about these stats.

mattmaroon• 14 years ago

That needs to end with ", 2 people you actually know using it sporadically to post photos."

mercuryrising• 14 years ago

Do I count as 'active' if I only use the photo backup from my Android phone?

magnusgraviti• 14 years ago

Even with this G+ looks like a social service for IT-related people. A lot of programmers I know use G+.

But other people prefer to stay with those social services where the most of their friends are. So happened it is not G+ but Facebook and other (e.g. VKontakte).

Just noticed.

army• 14 years ago

Is there detailed information about what counts as a Google+ MAU? It's not totally clear what they are counting and how much of them are true MAUs of the social network versus people who have Google accounts who somehow interacted with something Google+ related while signed into Gmail (e.g. accidentally clicked on a +1 next to a search result, or the notifications in the black bar).

I'm a Google+ MAU, since I'm usually signed into my Google account, and occasionally read blog posts on Google+. I'm a Google+ MAU in the same way as I'm a MAU of plenty of other blog hosting sites. I don't use it as a social network.

I think more detailed engagement numbers would tell the true story.

panacea• 14 years ago

Is commenting on YouTube an active G+ action?

pbharrin• 14 years ago

Do robots count as "active users"?

aliks• 14 years ago

Question is What is G+:

a) social network b) New target for adsense c) annoying sh-it that is everywhere.

jwumanji• 14 years ago

Im interested in knowing ehat googlr considers an `active use. the google plus screen is integrated with their ecosystem but i dont know much who actively use it.

programminggeek• 14 years ago

Google+ does have one killer feature: easy videoconferencing. It has very much changed the way our remote team works with our client.

As a "status update" social network (in the FB, Twitter, MySpace), I'm not sure that Google+ is going to change the world, but as a set of communication tools, it might end up being what Wave always wanted to be.

GFischer4• 14 years ago

Thanks for the tip, I'll try that one out :)

PostOnce• 14 years ago

You're automatically signed up for Google+ when you create a Gmail account now, or at least I was last week. I was annoyed. I had to manually turn it off. You don't just slap my name on the public internet without asking me, Google.

I thought they'd learned a lesson about this kind of behavior from Buzz.

Evbn4• 14 years ago

I am 98% certain they did learn from Buzz and did not create a public profile for you without you clicking something to add Plus to your Gmail account.

Edit: just tried it. After creating a gmail accoun in mobile firefox, I had to click through an interstitial ad page punting the Plus app, and then find the hidden Cancel button on a G+ sign up form that was prefilled, and then I got to my new mailbox.

So, it doesn't ever publish private data without consent, but the UX is definitively evil in pretending to hold your mail hostage.

Evbn4• 14 years ago

Monthly is not "engagement", it is "barely aware of existence". What is daily or weekly?

Google+: 400 Million Registrations, 100 Million Monthly Active Users

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