

Vic Gundotra reports Google+ passing 100,000,000 monthly active users - msabalau
https://plus.google.com/u/0/107117483540235115863/posts/2YWhK1K3FA5

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cs702
Google's strategy with G+ is looking smarter by the day: instead of trying to
compete head-on with FaceBook, Google simply made sharing via Google+ the
default _path of least resistance_ for everyone using one or more of its
applications. Now there are around 400 million people sharing things on
Google+ (even if many of them are doing so inadvertently), and 100 million
people are visiting plus.google.com every month to access all this user-
generated content. In short, Google figured out how to get the content, and
now it's getting the users.

~~~
eddieplan9
On the other hand, I was so annoyed by the G+ notifications I now never access
Google services as a logged in user. I now check gmails with Mail.app (faster
than web-based GMail any way), read Google reader feeds with Reeder, and I
never feel missed out. If you think this Google+ strategy is brilliant and
cost-free, then I'd at least argue that it costs some long-term loyal users
and annoys a whole bunch more.

~~~
StavrosK
What G+ notifications do you mean?

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Evbn
The red box in the upper right corner of every Google property.

~~~
StavrosK
Hmm, that doesn't strike me as very annoying, but couldn't you just disable
them?

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atirip
This is like a reading news from Mars. Lots of martians doing something,
somewhere. Interesting, but I really do not know any martian.

~~~
lawdawg
If I was a betting man, I would say most of the usage is _not_ in the USA and
Europe. Probably primarily in India, Asia, and South America where Google
products tend to get a ton of usage. That's really nothing to be ashamed of,
but it really gives the impression that no one uses G+ when the tech press is
primarily located in an area which doesn't see a ton of G+ usage.

~~~
knowtheory
I know three separate communities of varying technical prowess who have ended
up on Google+ and seem to be functioning quite happily (Members of the open
data/open governance community, an extended science fiction community
featuring some rather well known members such as the authors of the Expanse
and SMBC, and folks like Yehuda Katz).

Every last one of these people is based in the USA.

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arturadib
There must be something seriously deceptive about these stats.

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 switching 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...](http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0)

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...](http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google%2B,+google+plus&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=0)

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...](http://www.google.com/trends/?q=google+plus,+google%2B,+twitter&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd&sort=1)

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.

~~~
Kylekramer
Isn't using Trends a pretty bad metric? I imagine most people searching for
Twitter these days are just trying to get a link to their homepage. Google+
has a link to its homepage on Google search itself, so Google Trends isn't a
very reliable data source.

~~~
arturadib
Sure, it's not perfect, but a factor of 70?

Also, if you're going to include links from other properties you have to
factor in (for example) that iOS has Twitter sign-in built in, so Twitter is
also greatly underrepresented...

~~~
Evbn
It is the _same_ property. You go to Google, and before you start typing a
search, you see +Name and the red notification box that carry you to Plus.

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Roritharr
I visit G+ more often than Facebook nowadays. My Facebook stream is cluttered
by all sorts of people, talking mostly about very private stuff. My G+ Stream
is mostly links to interesting Stuff or Newsarticles.

The comments are mostly very relevant and insightful, except for the ones in
the recent days about the islamic riots, but that was even worse on
Facebook...

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kingsley_20
I seem to have entirely unintentionally signed up for G+ 3 times with
different gapps accounts. Till they fix the identity issues, no one is going
to take these stats seriously.

~~~
s_henry_paulson
There will always be erroneous data, but monthly active users is a fairly
powerful statistic.

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autophil
I'm one of those rare weirdos that actually likes and uses G+. It was my
daughter that got me to join but it's a way better experience than FB, and
I've been using it everyday since.

~~~
epoxyhockey
Add me to the list. Last week, I wanted to upload a complete album of vacation
photos to share with just my family (many of whom aren't on Facebook). G+
allows me to generate a unique link to that album without requiring anyone to
sign up to view the photos.

Just last night a family member wouldn't Skype with me because the software
"wasn't setup" on their computer. I initiated a hangout (since they use gmail)
and everything worked perfectly.

Google's strategy reminds me a little bit of Microsoft's where they are the
service that pops up first when people are looking to do things. As long as
their product is equal to or better than their competitors, they should be
able to win the slow race.

~~~
engtech
Every facebook album has a unique URL you can share with non-Facebook people.

(just checked, yes that feature is still there. It's on the bottom of every
photo album that you own)

~~~
epoxyhockey
Good to know - thanks!

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ryanhuff
G+ isn't the social network. G+ is their "social layer" on top of their
existing services. When you take a picture on your Android phone, you have
likely become an active G+ user as it uploads the picture to your G+ account.
And this is likely extended to all sorts of other products that Google offers,
such as Google Pages, Maps, etc. So you can't compare Google+ numbers to
Facebook. Many of the user interactions with G+ are so soft that are barely
"active".

~~~
pkulak
No, you're just making things up to try to make Google+ look bad. The only way
that photos automatically upload to your account is if you download the
Google+ app from the store, sign in, then enable that feature. That sounds
like an engaged user to me and exactly the data that should count as an
"active" user. I really don't understand the hostility that shows up every
time Google+ announces some accomplishment. It seems like the old idea that
eating an animal could give you its strength. On Hacker News, dumping on a
project makes you better than its engineers, I suppose.

~~~
ryanhuff
Sorry, no. I have no desire to make G+ look good or bad.

Also, if I installed the G+ app 6 months ago, and then take a picture of my
kid today, there is no explicit intent to engage with G+. Claiming that I
"engaged" with G+ is ridiculous. You have to recognize this. This certainly is
not the type of "engagement" that they are trying to sell to advertisers or
the press.

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dean
I signed up my kids for Gmail recently. It seems to automatically create a
Google+ account and profile, and I had to jump through all kinds of hoops to
disable all that stuff. We only wanted email. I wonder if we're included in
the 400 million who have upgraded to Google+.

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MatthewPhillips
Does clicking this link suddenly make me an active user?

~~~
AustinGibbons
I would like to see a breakdown of what people do on g+. For example, using
google talk to have a video conversation results in a g+ notification...

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ajross
Clearly such a breakdown would be interesting. But in context you seem to be
implying that a video call "doesn't count" as a Google+ usage. If you, say,
take a Instagram photo or message someone using Facebook chat but don't look
at the front page, are you "not using Facebook?". I'd expect Facebook would
count you as a "user" for the day, no?

~~~
AustinGibbons
I'm not saying 100,000 is an unfair statistic, but what I meant to get at
instead was growth through g+ versus inclusion through tack-on services (a
totally valid and excellent way to bring users into your product :-) as I tend
to agree with some of the other comments describing it as "the path of least
resistance" for sharing content through google.

~~~
Evbn
When google adds plus to video chat, is that tack on?

When fb adds video chat to your feed, us that tack on?

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nico
The only people I personally know that use Google+, are Google employees. I
wonder what they consider/count as an active user.

~~~
ergo14
Almost all of my fellow developers (my dev circle is about 85 people) use it,
i also follow quite a few of interesting product pages, also some of my
friends use it - so def. there are people using it. My circles are carefully
crafted so i dont see facebook like usless stuff.

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grandalf
In other words, Google has now activated 100,000,000 existing google and
google apps accounts with the plus button on the top nav.

~~~
vibrunazo
Read the last sentence of the post. It's only counting people who visited the
g+ stream or mobile app.

~~~
grandalf
Hmm, it's still 99% the same 5 people (one of whom is Vic) on my google plus
feed, even though I follow many hundreds of people.

Whatever the number is, or whatever the value of the audience is, I'd judge
its current state as about 1/100th of Twitter's.

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caycep
Maybe its just who i am following on G+, but my usage patterns have roughly
been:

G+: great posts by prominent computer scientists, programmers, engineers (Rob
Pike, Andy Herzfeld, Douglas Crockford, etc), many of whom work for google.

FB: everybody else.

~~~
callahad
It really is all contingent on who you circle. There are a ton of active
photographers and at least a handful of hydrogeologists regularly using
Google+ in addition to all of the programmers. It's akin Twitter in that
regard: apparently the celebrity accounts are a huge draw for an enormous set
of Twitter's users, but I'm effectively oblivious to that aspect of the site.

------
coliveira
I clicked on G+ only to try to deactivate it. Sadly I am being counted now as
an active user.

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winter_blue
The only thing I use Google+ for is bookmarking. It's my bitly. I have g+1
button plug-in installed on my browser, so whenever I see something
interesting I bookmark it using it. Would this count as active usage?
Probably. But am I actually an active user? No. I don't go to their front page
everyday, check the news feed, e.t.c. So the 100 million is probably an over-
estimate.

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k3n
I wonder if a script request to plus.google.com (say, to load the +1 widget)
would count? It has to piggyback on your Google login (or else it wouldn't
know who to attribute any +1's to), and so would simply loading a page that
has a +1 button count as an "active user"? I don't think it's too far outside
the realm of possibility.

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pastaking
What does "active" mean?

~~~
simonh
What he says he means by it in the post?

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aestetix
I'm curious how many Google services make automatic calls to plus.google.com
for a variety of reasons.

As a former G+ user who was opted into SPYW without my consent, I tend to be
skeptical of any announcements like this. Besides, why have they been so
evasive of releasing numbers before?

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anon1385
Translation: 100 million YouTube or gmail users also read blog posts on G+ at
least once a month.

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rgarcia
I'm really curious how they measure "active". For example, recently I've
noticed that when I initiate a video chat in gchat it forces me to use a
hangout on Google+. Does this make me an active Google+ user?

~~~
Evbn
Why do you consider socializing on a Google built network using a Google front
end to not be a usage of Google plus?

Because it wasn't called "plus" when you started?

Are instagram users not really using facebook?

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webwanderings
What a deceptive and misleading headline here at HN. The source says: "over
400,000,000 people have upgraded to Google+".

Is there a difference between "active users" and "upgraded users"?

~~~
silverbax88
Yes - there's a huge difference. Want to create a gmail account? Guess what-
you've got Google+! YouTube account? AdWords? AdSense? Bingo - Google+.

I use Google+ for hangouts to run our remote meetings. It works pretty well.
But not much use for it beyond that. Of course, that's not saying it's any
better than Facebook - I only use FB to promote stuff related to my business.

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sabret00the
I think this is feasible. There's surely a 100m geeks in the world.

Also don't forget that goog.le links, open in the browser on Android phones.

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myspy
I'm no Google enthusiast and deactivated my G+ account a couple of months ago,
and absolutely no one I'm friends with at FB was using G+.

It's one of those Google things, "normal" persons, not related to IT won't
use. They already have a FB account, why more social stuff?

And Google in general boils down for most people to search and maybe mail. The
whole Android story pulls in a lot of "normal" people, but I doubt that those
will spontaneously start to get involved with G+.

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scottbartell
Active G+ user = an active gmail user?

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AaronI
Did you read the post? It's counting those who have visited the G+ stream or
used the mobile app.

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rm999
I clicked on the link, and am now likely going to count as an active user
because I was logged into gmail. In other words, I am NOT a g+ user, but
google probably counts me as one because of my gmail account. So, scottbartell
may have a valid point.

~~~
Evbn
You clicked the link to plus.Google.com, meaning you just acively used the
site. Are you suggesting that referrals should not be counted as active uses?

Now, Direct visits would be interesting to get some counts for.

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franze
yeah, i think i clicked +1 last month (once), too. proud to be one of 100 000
000.

