
If Google's Really Proud Of Google+, It Should Share Some Real User Figures - AndrewWarner
http://marketingland.com/if-googles-really-proud-of-google-it-should-share-some-real-user-figures-9796
======
lmkg
So Google's argument is that because G+ is pervasively integrated, you can use
it without being on plus.google.com. While this is technically correct[1]...
they're still being evasive. Not everyone using G+-enabled Google products is
using the G+ bonus features.

Rather than dancing around the single "user" number, Google could give more
direct usage stats by breaking it down by feature. 20MM on plus.google.com,
another 30MM sharing content onto G+, another 10MM clicking on G+ results in
the normal Google SERPs, and so forth. It's still not a complete picture, but
it's a hell of a lot better than "enabled G+ once, and is currently active on
YouTube" that they're reporting now.

I am inclined to agree with the conspiracy theory that if these secondary
stats were any good, we would be hearing about them.

[1] The best kind of correct!

~~~
bishnu
"I am inclined to agree with the conspiracy theory that if these secondary
stats were any good, we would be hearing about them."

I don't think it's that simple. Google publishes very few figures that have to
do with its core profitability. For example, number of searches a day is not
reported. I doubt it's because that figure isn't any good.

~~~
lmkg
But in this case, Google _is_ publishing numbers. Numbers that by their own
admission aren't even trying to measure the right thing, and which seem to
over-count that wrong thing anyways. Given that they're publishing any numbers
at all, why are they publishing those numbers in place of more relevant ones?

~~~
vladd
After early-adopters, regular people will join only if their friends are
already there.

Any user metric going upwards says "look, it's not a ghost town anymore" and
drives future adoption.

~~~
abraxasz
Well, that's assuming people actually believe what Google. And even they
believe what Google says, they don't have any compelling reason to switch from
Facebook until their friends actually do switch.

What I mean is that even assuming that people believe google's statement of
"it's not a ghost town anymore", they are probably not going to move until it
actually stops being a ghost town.

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freehunter
First, Google has made moves to indicate that Google+ is not a finished
product, or even a 1.0 release. Their recent overhaul shows that. Their lack
of public APIs shows that.

Secondly, Google has made it pretty clear that Google+ does not stand on its
own. The "plus" is in the name after "Google". It's Google, plus. Google+ is
just a frontend, an entry point. It's the Yahoo landing site for all of
Google's services. Youtube, Google Search, Picasa, they are the "plus" in
Google+.

Google+ is not and never will be (and never wanted to be) a Facebook. Google
wants it to be a grouping of their services in a way that's easy to consume
and share. I'll admit I didn't read the entire article, I skimmed it because
there are about a billion points being made in the fashion of a one-man
argument.

The entire article could have been just this one sentence:

 _And yes, Google+ is indeed a layer that goes throughout Google properties._

It is illogical for the author to be irritated by reality. Taking Google+ by
itself and comparing it to Facebook is equally illogical.

~~~
Steko
"Google has made moves to indicate that Google+ is not a finished product, or
even a 1.0 release."

Honestly I hope Google destroys FB but let's stop apologizing for their half
finished releases. G+ was released 9 months ago. For 6 months they've
defaulted new g-mail users to sign up for it. This is not a beta, full stop.

If it's unfinished, if there are no APIs, if they broke a lot of the custom
apps that were made for their struggling social service with their month 9
redesign, those aren't things you make excuses for. Those are things you list
as negatives.

~~~
freehunter
For any other company, sure. Google has a habit of pushing incomplete products
out.

When Minecraft was first released to play, was that broken? Was Notch making
excuses when he said "I'm still working on it"? Was it not continuously
updated. And he charged _money_ for that. Let's not forget how long GMail was
in "beta". Google does betas. They push unfinished products out, for free, and
update them continuously until they are finished. That's not a negative,
that's Google being Google. Anyone who's been on the Internet for more than a
year knows this is how they operate, and that most of the time it ends up
being pretty cool.

~~~
mikescar
I think the parent's point is that if that's how you're going to roll, it can
count as a negative. There's a difference between breaking functionality, and
not providing new features until it's ready.

Google Plus is not marketed as a beta product. With all the computer science-
type smart folks at Google, I don't understand why big breakage is OK.

> They push unfinished products out, for free, and update them continuously
> until they are finished.

Well, it's not 'free', since the users are the product. And yes, some things
get finished, other unfinished things like Wave just get cut at some point.

~~~
freehunter
_I don't understand why big breakage is OK._

Did they break their published APIs? They've only ever published a handful of
frankly useless API calls. If it was someone just scraping unpublished
routines, that's hardly Google's fault.

------
Steko
Me, yesterday:

"Seems to me that continuing to count everyone who gets an Android phone or
signs up for Gmail as a G+ user just invites people to pile on and point out
how underwhelming G+'s userbase has been to date."

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3829846>

You can defend G+ being a beta release or fundamentally different from
facebook and twitter despite aping tons of FB and Twitter features. What you
can't really defend imho is the continued exaggeration of G+'s userbase. I'd
guess over half of the claimed G+ userbase has never touched it. Many have
probably never heard of it.

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rachelbythebay
If you are running a social network, then you publish how many people are
actively doing stuff inside of it. Clearly, they are not doing this.

If you are running an identity service which provides more information for the
targeting of advertisements, then you publish how many "enhanced" profiles you
now have. What you are trying to do is reach the people who would like to do
that kind of advertising. Every time that number grows, it's even more
inviting to them.

G+ can succeed on their own terms even if nobody ever posts a single thing to
it. If you've populated your profile with information, they have already
succeeded.

~~~
jrockway
This argument doesn't make sense. Google did profile pages long before
Google+. And advertisers don't need your real name and baby pictures to target
advertisements at you. (I personally see no value in this for any advertisers,
but I'm speaking for myself and not Google.)

~~~
eternalban
> And advertisers don't need your real name and baby pictures

What a wonderful observation.

If you accept the characterization that Google's "free" software product users
(us) are called Google's (eye balls) product for its clients (advertisers),
the intriguing question is just which (new?) "client" of Google is interested
in us as identified individuals.

~~~
jrockway
Which client is interested in open source projects or self-driving cars?

~~~
eternalban
Come on! Larry Page didn't sent a memo out tying your bonus to self driving
cars.

~~~
jrockway
Pretty much every company ties bonuses to the success of the company. Google
is no different.

------
stretchwithme
Google+ sent me some insight the other day. The 3 posts on Google+ that should
interest me the most.

The topic of all three? That's right, you guessed it. Google+ itself.

yawn.

------
eblume
Subscription counts in G+ are only a problem (to me) if:

A) They are too low for a user to engage anyone, which is simply untrue (I
have lots of fun and engaging conversations - with strangers, often - on G+)

B) The product relies on a massive user base.

You'll have to ask Google about point B as far as profitability goes, but for
me, point B does not apply because I don't care if my Aunt is on G+.

To me, G+ is a much nicer Twitter, and a way to organize and meta-tag my
contacts. Nothing more. I use it every day and I am happy with it like that.

I would be very sad if G+ ever became like Facebook (which, in my very cynical
opinion, is basically a 'happy birthday' rotary club & dating service).

~~~
blntechie
Don't take me wrong. But I think your comment reaffirms what everyone and the
author of the post says about Google+. That Google+ is quickly turning out to
be an elitist network where people don't want what they perceive as 'common'
people to be part of. And it's not cool anymore for them once it's adopted
widely. It's not much very different from how iOS app users reacted when
Instagram launched their Android app and saw a flood of Android users coming
in to the network or how Quora early adopters complained about when they
opened up from the private beta.

------
dendory
I use Google+ every couple of days, and I do see new stuff in my stream
(mostly because I follow over 800 people) but lets stop beating around the
bushes, Google+ is a failure if they wanted to make a dent in Facebook, it's a
failure if they wanted the greater world population to care about it, and I
don't see how Google can do anything about it now. Sure, just like Buzz, it
has its regular users, but it's not what Google was hoping for close to a year
after launch I'm sure.

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pavanky
I have to ask, what was the point of the post ?

It just looked like an endless rant deviating from the numbers that google was
not publishing to the comparision with Facebook to the actual realization that
G+ may not be a _ghost town_ and back to more google bashing.

-1 if I could, but I can not.

------
Aloisius
_When Facebook says it has over 800 million active users, it really seems to
mean people who came into Facebook and used the service in some way in a given
month. They seem to be logged in and somehow actively using their accounts._

As I understand it, Facebook counts anyone who clicks a like button on any
website as being an active user for the month too.

It wouldn't shock me if, as non-Facebook user, if they counted my visit to a
public event page as me becoming active too.

~~~
barredo
No , they don't. Facebook is pretty serious about that:

> • Monthly Active Users (MAUs). We define a monthly active user as a
> registered Facebook user who logged in and visited Facebook through our
> website or a mobile device, or took an action to share content or activity
> with his or her Facebook friends or connections via a third-party website
> that is integrated with Facebook, in the last 30 days as of the date of
> measurement. MAUs are a measure of the size of our global active user
> community, which has grown substantially in the past several years.

[http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/0001193125120...](http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm)

~~~
whatusername
" or took an action to share content or activity with his or her Facebook
friends or connections via a third-party website that is integrated with
Facebook"

Sounds like clicking a like button on a site.

~~~
xxbondsxx
Yes clicking, not just viewing. Google counts visiting Youtube (while logged
in) as using Google+. These are completely different metrics.

~~~
abraham
Not it isn't. If you visit <https://www.facebook.com/media/video/> Facebook
counts it. Google just hosts their videos on a different domain. It is still
the same Google Account.

------
kfury
If I'm really proud of something I've done, I would think it's a cop-out to
crow about my DAU or MAU to imply that it's good, especially if I'm Google and
have the ability to drive hundreds of millions of inorganic users at it.

------
loverobots
Google also has a funny way of counting "shares": if I have 1 million people
in my circles and tell them to check a story, 1 million shares just happened
("A million items were shared"). Technically they may be right but it's not
how I see it, a million shares would be when a million people share it, not
merely get something pushed in their pages.

To answer some comments, I think they are plenty of ways Google can share
meaningful, easy to understand stats about G+, if they wanted to.

------
capo
As I see it 90% of Google+'s purpose is to get users to create profiles and
then these popup within Google properties in the form of picture thumbnails
when the user comments or uploads stuff, etc. Which is perfectly reasonable as
almost all web apps now operate around user profiles (mostly Facebook's), what
I find to be unreasonable however is the seemingly heightened intolerance some
pundits have developed towards G+.

~~~
betterth
Did you read the article? Most of these pundits don't hate G+, or Google's
business model here, or what they're doing with social.

They hate the PR nonsense that Google's feels is neccesary to abstract away
the fact that they're tiny compared to Facebook.

I do too, it feels dishonest. You don't need to post the same numbers as
Facebook. No one is expecting you to. So stop lying with statistics. It's
like, Do No Evil is officially gone. Maybe a few white lies here and there
never hurt anyone, right?

~~~
Retric
Facebook is also tiny next to Facebook.

Pundits have confused social networking with Facebook to the point where
playing games or up voting articles is social networking because that's
something that Facebook does. Nobody considers XBox live a social networking
site, but people do the same things on Facebook and that counts.

------
ineedafresca
I actually believe the google+ user count. do a search for cialis, viagra,
etc. - it's spam central. but then again so is tumblr, twitter, etc. and no
one gives them grief about calling these folks users.

------
megablast
Just as the only one sharing phone sales is Apple (one exception, Samsung and
the Galaxy S2). Just as Apple is the only one sharing Tablet numbers.

