Google+’s user base – impressive or not?
Recently various figures have come out about the growth of Google+. Just today The Guardian reports on the network seeing 67 million visitors in November, with 2.7 million of those coming from the UK (the US is the biggest market with close to 15 million visitors).
Meanwhile, Hitwise is shouting about 49 million US visits (as opposed to visitors) in December . And when it comes to actual accounts, Ancestry.com’s founder Paul Allen has been keeping track of the service and estimated that there were 60+ million live as of Christmas.
Yet at the same time, for many of us with Google+ accounts these figures don’t seem to make a great deal of sense. I suspect I am not untypical in that I’ve created a profile, but after an initial burst of enthusiasm don’t use it very much. There seems to be a disconnect between raw visitor numbers and engagement and I wanted to see if I could dig into this a little bit more.
- First of all the numbers. Remember that these figures are monthly and includes someone who might only access the site once. They don’t measure actual activity.
- 14.7 million US visitors sounds impressive, but a post by Sysomos says that this is actually only a 10% growth since late Sept
- Similarly in November, the LA Times reported on the fact that, despite there being some impressive growth spurts, traffic actually dropped in 11 out of 21 weeks, with fluctuations of 10-20% from one week to the next
- Finally, the Hitwise number for December mentioned above sounds huge. However, Digital Trends highlights a figure that I think is key. For the week of 17 December, Hitwise tracked nine million visits. By comparison, in September, Google+ was managing 15 million visits a week with a much lower user base
Why do articles such as the one in today’s Guardian keep on presenting the big numbers without digging deeper into what those numbers actually mean? I think the article on the Sysomos website has got it right – “people really, really want Google+ to succeed.”
There’s been a lot of talk about the next Facebook, and Google+ has been held up as the most likely candidate.
Google+ isn’t the next Facebook. It could be the next Twitter
My own view is that Google+ is not a failure in the waiting. It also isn’t the next Facebook. Facebook is more dominant in social media than Google is in search. With Facebook having a 95% share of social media time in the US it just won’t happen – for now.
In fact a better parallel isn’t between Google+ and Facebook, but between Google+ and Twitter. Sure, the networks are very different but there are a lot of similarities in the growing pains and user profiles of both. There was a time, around 2008/2009 when people also ‘really, really’ wanted Twitter to succeed. Then in 2009 / 2010 the first questions about engagement on Twitter started to appear.
At the time some people compared it to the virtual world Second Life (which attracted an enormous amount of hype in 2007, without the user numbers ever justifying it) . I predict that in 2012 we’ll see similar stats rolled out about Google+, showing that most accounts are barely active or dormant.
Fast forward to today, and Twitter’s user base is impressive, yet even back in March, the evidence was that a relatively small number of ‘elite’ users – 20k people – were responsible for 50% of activity Behind a large number of casual users there is a very committed, small but influential ‘core’.
I suspect the same holds true for Google+ And so despite only having 1/3 of Twitter’s numbers (and a much smaller proportion of time), Twitter has consistently punched above its weight in terms of influence.
Case in point – in 2011 it was Twitter and not Facebook that dominated the mainstream news agenda.
Related articles
- Google+ Tops Facebook’s Growth Rate (socialmayonnaise.com)
- How Google+ Is Changing the Web, Even Though No One Wants It To (hubspot.com)
- Hitwise: U.S. Google+ traffic leaps 55 percent in December (news.cnet.com)
- Google+ Posts Strong December Growth Numbers (coated.com)
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Thanks Teddy, some really excellent points
What Google+ has most in common with is Microsoft’s LIVE platform. They’re both a kind of social glue that binds together a set of discrete services, with the social aspects an evolution and extension of those services rather than the be-all and end-all. The difference is that Google made a big fuss about the social overlay being a service in it’s own right, whereas Microsoft’s offering has grown organically – in both services and connectivity – over time.
One consequence of that is that Microsoft’s network has a very low profile. Ask people if they’re on the Microsoft social network and the response will largely be a confused ‘no’, but actually a huge number of people are – anyone using Hotmail, or MSN, or Xbox LIVE, or SkyDrive, Windows phone or Zune Marketplace has dipped a toe into the water.
The thing with both LIVE and Google+ is that it’s not the same as ‘joining’ a network; if you use the email, or the chat, or the cloud storage, or the music service, or the app store or any of the myriad other services then you’ve already created a persistent login with that company and it’s just a question of how social and integrated you want your experience of those services to be. In Microsoft’s case no one really uses the social layer because all it does is aggregate activity from other platforms via a hideous interface; on Google+ the reasons for lack of engagement are presumably different (I’d guess it’s mainly lack of differentiation and friend presence).
What this means in the long term is anyone’s guess; it’s possible that Google+ will never become popular, but at the same time it’s not like older social networks where people simply stopped navigating to them and stopped thinking about them. Whenever users are on any other Google service, Google+ is always going to be just a click away – and the barrier to profile set-up is lower than ever before. We might see big ebbs and flows of users over time – maybe even over generations – rather than just the classic social network bell curve.
Thanks @Cat @Elbiddulph! As mentioned in the post I do think Google+ has a future, but as something approaching the early Twitter as a network to target influencers.
Talk of it being the next Facebook however seems way off the mark and I’m waiting for that first piece of research to come out in 2012 pointing out just how many accounts are dormant
It was Nielsen who did the original hatchet job on Twitter in 2009, by showing 60%+ accounts were inactive – http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/online_mobile/twitter-quitters-post-roadblock-to-long-term-growth/ – inevitably a similar article will be appearing about Google+ very soon
Nice critique! I’d noticed the same bouncing around of figures over the past week or so… The reality is, G+ just hasn’t worked, which is a shame because it had huge potential to be the grown-up Facebook (something a lot of online users are looking for).
I’ve tried, oh, how I’ve tried! Then, this past week, I deleted my Google+ account. Nice to know I’m not alone in not quite getting it. I am active on fb and twitter, but could not find a similar sense of connection and community on Google+. Perhaps I had the wrong mix of people in my circles, but it seemed even more dominated by the few, without engagement of others.