Vic Gundotra reports Google+ passing 100,000,000 monthly active users | Hacker News Reader

Vic Gundotra reports Google+ passing 100,000,000 monthly active users

plus.google.com

63 pointsmsabalau91 comments

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.

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.

What G+ notifications do you mean?

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

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

Wouldn't it take a lot less effort to just disable notifications once, rather than make sure you're signed out of Google every time you use it?

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

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.

What do you mean? Like country by country, or in aggregate US vs non-US? Because even for Facebook, most of the usage would be non-US, obviously, since they have 1 billion users and there aren't that many people in US.

But on country by country basis, Google+ gets the most users from US by far:

http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2012/02/22/google-dem...

I wonder how they are pushing the millions of Orkut users into it. those were huge in brazil/india for a while.

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.

Don't worry 99,999,999 of the users are Scobilizer, the other is Vic Gundotra checking the user stats.

Is that one of the services that will take your inane post made on 1 social platform and the mindlessly propagate it to all of the others that you have? If so, that's a point I wanted to bring up: does "active" mean, logs in and does stuff, or does "active" simply mean they're syndicating content to it?

No, Scobleizer is a name for Robert Scoble, a well known Google+ power user.

Unlike FB or Twitter, it's relatively difficult to post content to Google+. They only recently opened up APIs to some third-party social media management tools like Hootsuite, and they're still not just open to anyone.

Would you have made a similar comment if these numbers were for some other site, say Baidu or Rakuten?

The most obvious difference is that I know who are the users of these sites.

Google+ might be popular in a geographic part of the world, or among a certain community I'm not part of, just like Baidu is in China, Rakuten is in Japan, Vkontakte is in Russia, Orkut in brazil, etc.

I just have no idea, and it seems I'm not the only one, what this demographic they have conquered is.

I have a feeling most people here would be quite interested to hear news about martians.

Hi, nice to meet you.

In all seriousness, I think Google+ is a massive force. If you play the SEO game at all (and let's face it, most web companies do at least a little bit), then you have to pay attention to Google+ because it's showing up on search results. That makes those web companies more invested in getting their users to use Google+ and encourages adoption. Circular, strategic, very interesting to watch.

That's the whole game, isn't it? Leverage your dominant market position in one area to win in another. These days, if you are a business, you have to play Google's game. And its not just web businesses. Its any business that markets to consumers. Leveraging their dominant position in search creates massive leverage to move people to G+.

Really? You don't know anyone using G+? If so, you are missing out. The +1 feature alone is worth the non-price of pre-admission.

Of course, I feel a similar way about Facebook. I know a lot of people use Facebook avidly, but I almost never do. Every time I log onto that site I regret it. At least on G+ I can aggressively tune out the boneheads with some hope of success and without incurring a ton of social kickback.

Yes, honestly really. I use FB to keep in touch with my real friends I don't see very often, or at all. Most of my friends are not geeks and they will never-ever join twitter or g+. Also I do not share much and I do not press Like buttons. Ever. Apps are disabled, explicitly. I do not seek popularity. My Friend Policy is - I must have meet you outside work and voluntarily talked with you about something not realated to work. Maybe I'm the last dinosaur.

> Most of my friends are not geeks and they will never-ever join twitter or g+.

And here you overplay your hand. You have no idea what Twitter's main userbase is.

I know, but for some reason, twitter never got off here.

The +1 is a feature?

I haven't seen any real value demonstrated from it, except as a marketing gimmick my Google. The number of reported "+1's" means absolutely nothing to me.

My friends +1 things and they get elevated on my search results. Since my friends tend to like things I too would be interested in (and they're also people I trust), this weighting is awesome and helps me all over the place.

That's the sales pitch of +1, but I see no value, and purposefully avoid it. That's just me. And I'd much rather have a "-1" button.

I see +1 more as a "please store this piece of marketing info to my personal data portfolio"; pretty ingenious of Google, but I'm not falling for it.

I'm not sure why you'd view it this way, at least while still engaging in ANY online activity. The reality of the modern web is that everyone is tracking everything you do with their assets all the time. Even people you might not expect are keeping server logs that, with sufficient massaging, could reveal a lot of data. And Google hardly needs you to TELL them this data. They can determine your existence and search habits and friends simply by examining secondary sources.

It's inevitable. Get over it. Or rather, get empowered by it.

Google's play here is that they have this data for when you click through–and it's been helping them for years–but now they're exposing it to you. So you get the benefits of big data analysis in a context you can understand. Instead of being some sort of back-alley data collection initiative, +1 makes the whole process very much an up-front-and-transparent thing, complete with data export. \

I'm not sure how much more consumer-friendly and empowering a feature can be. Society wants the benefits of big data analysis and so companies have to find ways to make it valuable, transparent, and straightforward. How is this relationship any different from your relationship with Mint.com or Simple?

> but I see no value, and purposefully avoid it.

Allow me to give you concrete cases. I was looking for a good raspberry pi breakout board so I can use the GPIO without concern that a bad soldering job would lead to a dead board. I type this in and I see those little people and +1 notifications for some products and blog posts and not others. I also see promoted images from a friend who just installed one.

I have a fairly good idea about the authenticity and trustworthiness of these people, and so the search results have helpfully incorporated this data and helped shape my purchasing process.

Now, I have made it a point to cultivate relationships with people in this space that are also G+ users, so it isn't "free", but it pays off pretty handsomely in cases like this.

Is that not a clear enough value proposition?

I think his point is that for some (can't speak for all) bubbling is not wanted at all. To give you an example (this is just me): I hate bubbling, so I use duckduckgo when I can. If I need to find a pair of skies, I do thorough searches, look at reviews or ask friends -- I don't rely on Google "sort of" knowing what my friends know. They may sell it as a social feature, but is it in fact no the opposite?

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...

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...

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...

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.

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.

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...

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.

One factor could be that the prominent links into G+ across Google properties means that people are less prone to navigate into G+ via by with Google search as they would do for Facebook/Twiiter.

Most peoples initial contact with it would've been the "+You" promotion with giant arrow pointing towards the black navbar, skewing the results even further against searching for "Google+" inside of Google.

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...

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.

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

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.

Me too, i got my whole family on there and have another peer group i share a lot of stuff with.

The stuff for my family is not visible to the public. People wanted a private network like Path, what is just for mobile unfortunately.

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.

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)

Good to know - thanks!

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".

From Vic himself: "Today's number of 100m is just on our plus.google.com destination site and the mobile app. Pretty amazing."

I'm going to wager that uploading a photo through instant upload doesn't count as using the mobile app.

Yes, I saw Vic interviewed by Guy Kawasaki at SXSW this year and he basically said exactly this. He was counting active users as people who had plus accounts, were logged in, and were using any product with a plus/social component, i.e search. By this metric, I'm an 'active user' (using their search engine) despite having not visited G+ in over 6 months.

That's not what he's saying now, though:

  Vic Gundotra
  
  +Andreas Proschofsky the numbers at I/O were google+ users all 
  across Google. So gmail users who used circles, or Android 
  users who plus oned an app etc were included. Today's number of 
  100m is just on our plus.google.com destination site and the 
  mobile app. Pretty amazing.

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.

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.

"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."

Unless you have installed & turned on G+ Instant Upload, this statement is untrue. If you have decided to turn on G+ Instant Upload, it doesn't seem unreasonable to consider those uploads activity.

Where is the G+ mindshare in the upload act?

It's not as if you're forgetting that you're uploading those images - you're getting hit with all kinds of notifications about it every time it happens. If anything, I wish there was less engagement involved.

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+.

Does clicking this link suddenly make me an active user?

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...

This time Vic specified that this is people accessing plus.google.com and mobile app. So I'm reasonably sure using gtalk on gmail wouldn't count.

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?

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.

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

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

probably, but the same can be said about Facebook users. Anyways, Vic expanded more about this metric in the comments:

The numbers at I/O were google+ users all across Google. So gmail users who used circles, or Android users who plus oned an app etc were included. Today's number of 100m is just on our plus.google.com destination site and the mobile app. Pretty amazing.

If you Like something, anywhere on the web, you're one of Facebook's "monthly active users".

Clicking on any link will make you a monthly active user on that destination site's metrics.

I think so. If so, I'd be part of the 100 million monthly actives. I don't have a google+ account but I do visit the pages of certain well known people in the industry every now and then.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

What does "active" mean?

What he says he means by it in the post?

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?

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

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?

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?

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"?

Of course. 100 mil people who use Google+ at least once a month, and the other 300 have registered with Google+ but haven't used it in the past month. The ratio seems to be 4:1 compared to Facebook's 2:1 of non-active to active monthly users (they use a very similar method to determine the active people), so I wonder why Google isn't taking more steps to reduce this ratio.

Maybe they care as much about "registered users" as they do about the active ones. Maybe they just want to have everyone with their real names on file, which might explain why they might not care about the ratio of non-active to active as much.

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.

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.

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+.

Active G+ user = an active gmail user?

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

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.

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.

It's a pretty meaningless measure - that's all I'm saying.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com