9 ms·

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

66 points by rkudeshi 14y ago

k3n 14y ago
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533055 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533055
ImprovedSilence 14y 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 14y ago
  I wonder when they'll figure out that putting out numbers no one believes actually hurts their perception?
- abraham 14y ago
  It sounds like you wouldn't be counted then since you didn't visit plus.google.com or actively use the mobile app.
  - ImprovedSilence 14y 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".
    - abraham 14y ago
      > And here too, I’m happy to report that we have just crossed 100,000,000 monthly active users on Google+ (plus.google.com and mobile app) Based on what Vic said I don't think you would be counted. They don't explicitly say what does and does not count but it sounds like you would only count when visit G+ and scroll through photos. I personally would count sharing from Reader but but instant upload from the mobile app is passive activity and should not be counted.
      - Evbn 14y ago
        What if I load plus in an iframe on Search, jusy to kill that obnoxious dancing red notification counter?
        abraham 14y ago
        It's not clear if that counts or not. Technically it is plus.google.com but from a user perspective it is not.
Steko 14y 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.
- GFischer 14y 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.
  - Steko 14y 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.
    - k3n 14y ago
      G+ is not a requirement for Google Play, I have it disabled across my domain and still access and use the store without issue.
      - Steko 14y ago
        "G+ is not a requirement for Google Play" Not claimed. The claim is that a Google Account is necessary for Google Play and when you sign up for a Google Account the default for G+ is on. And again I don't see anything wrong with that. But the obvious result is that this inflates the G+ numbers with people who aren't the least interested in G+ as a service. Again if Apple did this with Ping they'd be a laughingstock.
robotmay 14y ago
I had a lot of high hopes for G+; I really liked its initial implementation. However the current UI and general feel of the community has totally put me off, and I can't get back into it. The site UI (not the mobile apps, which are pretty good) is awful, and there's still no posting API as far as I know. And the community is so circlejerky that I can't stand to read through anything. Every photo is amazing, wonderful, and the best thing everyone has ever seen.
GFischer 14y 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 14y 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.
arturadib 14y 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&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 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&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 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,+twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1 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 14y ago
  Active probably means one active use of a Google+ umbrella property (e.g. hangouts, youtube, etc)
  - tonfa 14y ago
    According to the original plus post from Vic Gundotra, it means active use of mobile app or plus.google.com.
- ChuckMcM 14y 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.
filip01 14y 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.
- numbchuckskills 14y ago
  no.
mattmaroon 14y ago
That needs to end with ", 2 people you actually know using it sporadically to post photos."
mercuryrising 14y ago
Do I count as 'active' if I only use the photo backup from my Android phone?
magnusgraviti 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
  Is commenting on YouTube an active G+ action?
pbharrin 14y ago
Do robots count as "active users"?
aliks 14y ago
Question is What is G+: a) social network b) New target for adsense c) annoying sh-it that is everywhere.
jwumanji 14y 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.
googlengine 14y ago
U guys re kidding me. G+ is useful
programminggeek 14y 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.
- GFischer 14y ago
  Thanks for the tip, I'll try that one out :)
theDaveB 14y ago
My feed is very active but no one I know personally is on it. I follow about 10 people and have about 1700 in the hacker news circle. Posted my resume on their for some feedback, didn't get one comment. Posted on Facebook, 10 comments instantly. I am presuming that is because on Facebook people know me personally. Dave
PostOnce 14y 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.
- Evbn 14y 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.
Evbn 14y ago
Monthly is not "engagement", it is "barely aware of existence". What is daily or weekly?

66 points by rkudeshi 14y ago

k3n 14y ago

See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533055 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4533055

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 14y ago
I wonder when they'll figure out that putting out numbers no one believes actually hurts their perception?
abraham 14y ago
It sounds like you wouldn't be counted then since you didn't visit plus.google.com or actively use the mobile app.
- ImprovedSilence 14y 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".
  - abraham 14y ago
    > And here too, I’m happy to report that we have just crossed 100,000,000 monthly active users on Google+ (plus.google.com and mobile app) Based on what Vic said I don't think you would be counted. They don't explicitly say what does and does not count but it sounds like you would only count when visit G+ and scroll through photos. I personally would count sharing from Reader but but instant upload from the mobile app is passive activity and should not be counted.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      What if I load plus in an iframe on Search, jusy to kill that obnoxious dancing red notification counter?
      - abraham 14y ago
        It's not clear if that counts or not. Technically it is plus.google.com but from a user perspective it is not.

Steko 14y 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.

GFischer 14y 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.
- Steko 14y 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.
  - k3n 14y ago
    G+ is not a requirement for Google Play, I have it disabled across my domain and still access and use the store without issue.
    - Steko 14y ago
      "G+ is not a requirement for Google Play" Not claimed. The claim is that a Google Account is necessary for Google Play and when you sign up for a Google Account the default for G+ is on. And again I don't see anything wrong with that. But the obvious result is that this inflates the G+ numbers with people who aren't the least interested in G+ as a service. Again if Apple did this with Ping they'd be a laughingstock.

robotmay 14y ago

I had a lot of high hopes for G+; I really liked its initial implementation. However the current UI and general feel of the community has totally put me off, and I can't get back into it. The site UI (not the mobile apps, which are pretty good) is awful, and there's still no posting API as far as I know. And the community is so circlejerky that I can't stand to read through anything. Every photo is amazing, wonderful, and the best thing everyone has ever seen.

GFischer 14y 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 14y 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.

arturadib 14y 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&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0 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&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0 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,+twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1 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 14y ago
Active probably means one active use of a Google+ umbrella property (e.g. hangouts, youtube, etc)
- tonfa 14y ago
  According to the original plus post from Vic Gundotra, it means active use of mobile app or plus.google.com.
ChuckMcM 14y 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.

filip01 14y 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.

numbchuckskills 14y ago
no.

mattmaroon 14y ago

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

mercuryrising 14y ago

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

magnusgraviti 14y 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 14y 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 14y ago
Is commenting on YouTube an active G+ action?

pbharrin 14y ago

Do robots count as "active users"?

aliks 14y ago

Question is What is G+: a) social network b) New target for adsense c) annoying sh-it that is everywhere.

jwumanji 14y 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.

googlengine 14y ago

U guys re kidding me. G+ is useful

programminggeek 14y 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.

GFischer 14y ago
Thanks for the tip, I'll try that one out :)

theDaveB 14y ago

My feed is very active but no one I know personally is on it. I follow about 10 people and have about 1700 in the hacker news circle. Posted my resume on their for some feedback, didn't get one comment. Posted on Facebook, 10 comments instantly. I am presuming that is because on Facebook people know me personally. Dave

PostOnce 14y 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.

Evbn 14y 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.

Evbn 14y ago

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