

Google+ traffic grew by 480% in one month so press reports a 60% decline. - yanw
https://plus.google.com/u/0/113117251731252114390/posts/AZh8wwb76vR

======
FuzzyDunlop
The source is the Daily Mail. Anyone familiar with that rag will know never to
take whatever they say as truth.

Surprised they didn't run with 'Google+ gives you cancer'.

~~~
sambeau
Funny. True in general. But in this case The Daily Mail aren't necessarily
being deliberately disingenuous.*

What the original post is saying as that when the doors opened to the public,
Google+ traffic went up nearly 5-fold in a month from a private Google-staff-
and-their-freinds beta.

Even if we ignore the fact that it went up 1200% and then dropped back again,
5-fold seems a little disappointing.

Also, surely it is correct reporting to point out that there was a massive
drop-off effect. People signed up in their droves, tried it and then left.

No matter how Google try to spin this, it can't be good. If Google+ continues
to slowly build back over the next few months then maybe they will be fine.
But, based on a small biased sample of my 'social graph' it doesn't look like
it.

*—I can't believe I'm defending The Daily Mail.

~~~
redthrowaway
Whatever happens with G+, I hope it stays around. It's twitter with longer
posts, and facebook without the idiots. Aside from the network effect not
having kicked in yet, it really is an ideal service for me.

~~~
bergie
We had a service like that in Finland, called Qaiku. Now quite a lot of the
users seem to have migrated to Google+

------
vogonj
[http://insights.chitika.com/2011/failure-to-launch-google-
gr...](http://insights.chitika.com/2011/failure-to-launch-google-growth-spurt-
short-lived/) is the source article.

the 1200% number came from "Reportedly, Google+ saw a surge in traffic of over
1200% due to the additional publicity, but the increased user base was only
temporary, as was projected in an earlier insights post." and the 60% drop
came from "But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its
normal, underwhelming state."

but the graph right below that shows Google+ going back (in Chitika's "traffic
index", whatever that is) to just about where it was before it was made
public. as a result, I don't think those two numbers can be composed, and the
"heh, guess 480% doesn't count for anything" smugness I've seen from a couple
different places is based on everyone else's misconception of what the numbers
mean.

~~~
yanw
The data in question is suspect as no hard data is shown nor are they saying
on how many users the report is based on or how they were able to measure
traffic at all. Chitikta is a Google competitor of sorts their business is ads
and they do have a strong partnerships with Facebook.

~~~
vogonj
this link is some tech blogger's recapitulation of a Forbes tech blogger's
expose of a Daily Mail article announcing Chitika's press release.

how is it any more trustworthy? at least Chitika's page has a graph on it
(though they're tight-lipped about what that graph represents.)

~~~
taylorbuley
As a Forbes employee, it bothers me that it appears that Forbes is the source
of the misleading statistic rather than the outlet that published the analysis
of its incoherence.

We have a lot of really smart non-staff contributors (like Tim here, or my
personal favorite Timothy Lee) and they never get enough credit for the
independent thinking and analysis

~~~
jdp23
Tim's analysis in Forbes _is_ the source of the misleading "480%" statistic --
and the Forbes headline trumpeted the equally-misleading 60% statistic. So,
while I think that Forbes' blogs are frequently quite insightful, this wasn't
one of your better moments.

------
powertower
> On the day they opened the floodgates to the public, traffic immediately
> spiked by 1,200%. These new people were mostly enthusiastic new users. But a
> minority was tire-kickers who didn't stick around.

> When the dust cleared, total traffic was nearly five times higher than
> before the doors opened.

A 1200% to <500% drop is categorized as a "minority" of users leaving?

------
lolz
Tried to close my Google+ account and the choices it presents were confusing
at best ( this will delete your Google+ and also/maybe your Gmail? )

So instead chose a fake last name and got banned. MISSION ACCOMPLISHED :)

~~~
FrojoS
You got banned after changing your last name? Are those bans done by hand?

I know, that they have a real name policy but so has Facebook. A lot of my
friends and family changed there real names into fake names on Fb. Nobody got
ever baned.

~~~
rjd
I had my name changing rights taken away on Facebook. I got a message saying I
had breached the rules to many times and my punishment was keeping the last
name I entered LOL

I used that fake name for 2-3 years and only decided to try changing back
recently and it worked. I wonder if it was a bluff by Facebook and I could
have changed again at any time however.

------
jsz0
I assume there will be much tighter integration of Google+ into the next major
release of Android which should help solve the 'ghost town' problem so many
people are seeing with Google+ at this point. Ultimately they may have to give
SmartPhone makers some incentive to stop bundling the Facebook app/integration
on their devices. (or just make their own)

~~~
alexgartrell
> Ultimately they may have to give SmartPhone makers some incentive to stop
> bundling the Facebook app/integration on their devices.

Read: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft>

I'm not trying to be snide either, Microsoft leveraged its relationships with
OEMs to incentivize them to stop bundling netscape. I don't think that Google
would play that dirty, but it's certainly thin ice.

~~~
streptomycin
Google isn't a monopoly.

~~~
suitcase
But they probably have the size and the market power that would make
regulators take an interest in such behavior.

------
HankMcCoy
their double standard on real/fake names is a disgrace.

they ban people for using their internet handle that they have been using for
the last 15 years and on the other hand celebrities like madonna or 50 cent
are allowed to use their artist names

~~~
JonesTyner
This is, indeed, terrible. I guess we should all make music.

------
ashleyw
The Daily Mail (and Sunday Mail) is a right-wing, racist, anti-science paper
which goes out of its way to seek out inflammatory and exaggerated headlines
to scare the public and sell more papers. I wouldn't give them the time of
day.

~~~
hessenwolf
I have to respect the balls with which they present utter nonsense, and the
purity and refinement of their art of utter nonsense.

------
option1138
Google:Social::Microsoft:Search

------
kposehn
Ok, instead of reading the daily mail or various G+ posts, I went to the
source: Chitika.

They show a clear spike and return back to normal levels, as can be seen in
the graph on this page: [http://insights.chitika.com/2011/failure-to-launch-
google-gr...](http://insights.chitika.com/2011/failure-to-launch-google-
growth-spurt-short-lived/)

Key Notes:

1\. Chitika's conclusions from the data are sketchy and I don't put much stock
in them.

2\. The overall spike and rapid decline back is undeniable and troubling.

3\. The press of course likes headlines and Google is most certainly not a
media darling any longer, thus the news sensationalizing a relatively humdrum
statistic.

~~ Chitika's headline is quite clearly accurate ~~

~~~
nikcub
Key Note: The Chikita graph measures a 'traffic index', which could be
anything.

The bump is because G+ launched last week and it was linked to from Google.com
- the most popular web page in the world

Show me a product that has launched and not experienced a traffic 'bump'

If you measure the backend of that bump, you will always show a decline. Zoom
out.

And that is not to mention that Chitika do not publish their traffic
collection methodology. It is just some chart they pushed out to bloggers in a
press release (with their branding on it!) and all these bloggers have been
far too quick to publish.

edit: this tilted me enough that I wrote a blog post about it :
[http://nikcub.appspot.com/lies-damn-lies-and-google-
statisti...](http://nikcub.appspot.com/lies-damn-lies-and-google-statistics)

------
phlie
Being the size Google is, I sometimes wonder why it took them so long to come
up with an alternative to Facebook. If they had of launched Google+ back in
2005 or 2006 I think they would have had a decent chance against Facebook but
launching in 2011 was just a bad business move.

~~~
liuliu
No, you ignored that social network was not what it is today. And Facebook
played an important role in shaping what the social network should look like.
Google had its social networking site at that time, but they failed to iterate
on it. Facebook's success is not accidental, there were a lot effort and
thinking into it to make what it is today, and people shouldn't take it for
granted to say that they can come up with a Facebook alternative in 3 months
at 2005.

------
omnibot
I feel like G+ is like a breath of fresh air after having 50 or more mundane
minutia thrown at me every few minutes on Facebook. It's exhausting,
especially that new ticker.

G+ is clean, wide open and just the content people want to share at that
moment. Not also what page they liked 3 months ago, the last 4 spotify songs
they listened to and all the comments they made on other people's posts they
made (that are often not even people on my friend's list. Hello privacy?!?)

~~~
vogonj
how do you know that this isn't due to the (small, even if we're being
charitable) size of the community rather than a G+ design choice? if it's the
former rather than the latter, your days of liking G+ are numbered.

------
yvolution
well the argument of number is tricky since nobody has the number except
Google. But another product of google's own, Google Trends, do help to see the
decline. See here:

<http://bit.ly/rlq9aR>

~~~
nikcub
that is people searching for 'google+'

a more accurate graph is:

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=plus.google.com&ctab=0...](http://www.google.com/trends?q=plus.google.com&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2011&sort=0)

and that only shows up until the end of Sep and doesn't include the few days
last week that google+ was linked to from the homepage of google.com

~~~
chintan
They are a bit less than allrecipes.com

[http://www.google.com/trends?q=plus.google.com%2Callrecipes....](http://www.google.com/trends?q=plus.google.com%2Callrecipes.com&ctab=0&geo=all&date=2011&sort=1)

7M uniques: <http://www.quantcast.com/allrecipes.com>

I would estimate G+ getting 5M uniques. However, what would be interesting is
to know the pageviews.

Facebook recently said they had recieved 500M visitors in a single day.

~~~
nikcub
I don't think pageviews per visit is anywhere near what it is in Facebook -
probably even by an order of magnitude. That is just my own perception from
using it, though.

Facebook really do know how to suck time out of their users.

------
badclient
Vanity metrics much? A huge part of the reason why Google+ will fail is
Google's encouraging spread of vanity metrics instead of just admitting that
Google+ has a _serious_ , _serious_ challenge and is still on course to
die(it's already pretty irrelevant in the made-up social networking wars).

Heck I'd venture to say that myspace.com has more engagement than Google+. And
that is after Google shoving G+ onto its users.

