Google+ Forecast to Have 400M Registered Users by 2013 -- But How Many Will Be Actual Users?

Interesting forecast published over the holidays: Google+ is on trrack to have 400 million registered users, according to independent researcher Paul Allen. The New York Times has a story on Allen's methodology (a lot of crowdsourcing was involved). 400 million would be a huge number, roughly half the users Facebook has now, and about four times Twitter's current user base.

But how many of these registered users are actual, returning, engaged users? The Times notes, "Mr. Allen’s analysis doesn’t look at the important statistic of total time spent on Google+ per user, and whether that is increasing." In a comment to his original post, Allen says, "Google+ users upload 5X more photos per day than Facebook users (perhaps because of Android instant upload)." That's a kind of engagement level, but as Allen himself suggests, that may just suggest a lot of mobile uploading, but not necessarily overall engagement. I've asked Allen for engagement metrics, such as percent of people who share links on Google+, or comment on them, or even just "plus" them. Hopefully we'll get them, but I'm still skeptical Google+ is becoming a viable competitor to Facebook. From a personal perspective, I will say my Google Circles are growing, and I have almost as much people in that social network as Facebook. I note this number, grunt half-impressed, and then... go back to interacting with people on Facebook and Plurk and Twitter and Reddit.

Chart credit: Paul Allen.

Comments

[Kimberly Winnington (Gianna Borgnine inSL)]

Google+ is definitely growing in some sense, not just in registered users, but also in traffic as well (it grew by 55% - http://thenextweb.com/google/2012/01/02/google-just-had-its-biggest-traffic-month-of-all-time-up-55-from-november/). However, I agree with you that it is severely lacking in engagement and reach, which makes it hard to consider it a Facebook competitor.

I think it's still too soon to tell whether Google+ can become a Facebook competitor and it chances might be determined a lot by two things. Google+ is still in the early adopter stage and what Google does with the platform in the next few months will make a difference. They are undoubtedly integrating Google+ into every property they have including Andriod OS and Google Search. That type of leverage should give Google a fighting chance, but the final blow might come from Facebook's IPO. If Facebook's IPO fails (and I don't think it will), Google would have an advantage, but strong IPO would enable Facebook with the resources to hold their ground.

[Hamlet Au]

Good link, Kimberly, I was looking at it as I blogged this. Agreeing to your point, my impression is a lot (most?) of that traffic could just be new sign-ups and we're seeing a lot of one-try usage. It definitely seems to be gaining a lot of registrations. But as we painfully know from SL's 27 million registrations, more accounts often don't translate to more activity.

[Pussycat Catnap]

If Google- is getting integrated into everything they do - could that be a reason for some of the high numbers? Artificial inflation?

[Henry]

I am a professional webdeveloper in Europe and am just wondering about those numbers. Almost nobody here uses Google+. I log in about once a month to search for new people and hardly find anybody. My feed is empty. It´s anticipated here as a cheap copy of Facebook with no extra utility. But here is where the numbers come from. Once you have a Gmail account, you have a Google+ account. Those numbers are all fake. I don´t even believe the membership count of Facebook. Almost 1 billion people? I am living in a highly developed country, I am kind of an early adaptor and am about 30 years old. Still only about 50% of the people that I know have a Facebook account, eventhough 100% have internet. And now we speak about 1/7 of the world population, the majority doesn´t even have internet. A large part is too old or too young. It is really amazing what marketing folks make the people believe.

[Flipper Peregrine]

There's either a person behind a keyboard... or a person behind the code behind the spam being posted. :)

[Gwyneth Llewelyn]

What! 400 millions! I don't see anyone around lol — just geeks in their niche discussions. I'm not dissing Google + and saying that Facebook and Twitter are far better, but this is just my own perspective: I literally have to push friends into G+ (most of them long-time Gmail users) because nobody has heard about it, and when they do, they use it as little as SL: join, create a profile, post a few things, and then leave back to Twitter or Facebook.

Hmm. I think that Google is simply taking the number of Gmail users (which should be roughly 400 millions these days), assuming all have Google + profiles (most will), and simply claim a huge growth that doesn't exist.

Then again, parochial statistics don't mean anything regarding global use — just because everybody I know doesn't use Google +, it doesn't mean that there isn't anybody in it :)

[Alazarin]

I get added by people who I don't know on G+ and then showered with spam and cruft that is of no interest to me. What exactly is the point of G+ beyond being another scam by Google to get as much data as possible about people that they can then sell on at a profit?

Some of the people who spam me are so prolific I'm convinced thay're spambots.

[shockwave yareach]

I joined up when it was still invite only. I love the circles feature.

But when they started saying that everyone who has a funny name (as decided by some teen intern in Santa Clara) will be banned, I closed the + account. And until they allow me to have a pseudonym OR have two accounts, one for one group and the SL name for hanging out with SL folks, they can go catch a social disease with their "social network". All they want is a piece of Facebook's pie, but they aren't willing to create what the customers want to gain it. So in a few months, Google+ will decay and fall into Myspacetopia status, just like their previous attempts at social media failed.