Google Plus Reaches 25 Million Users, Activity Declines

While Google+’s user-base has continued to expand, having now reached over 25 million registered users, Google’s social site itself is seeing a decline in the number of daily visits.

The Explosive Growth to 25 Million

From day one, Google+ had an intense amount of interest and a big surge in the number of registered users. As Google continued to roll out their “by invitation only” beta, users lined up around the block. We were astonished at 10 million, then – in mid-July – 20 million, and now 25 million. (Note, however, that these are estimates based on unique visitors. Google has yet to release official numbers.)

As tracked by comScore and noted by Search Engine Land, this one month timeline for 25 million users means that Google has reached that benchmark 20 times faster than any other social site. (The next fastest was MySpace, which reached 25 million users in 20 months; Facebook took 36 months.)
U.S. adoption was also tracked by comScore. There was a burst around July 10th that last roughly a week, but then subsided. While commentators are wondering at why this might be the case, those who kept track of the invitation waves know that this timing correlates with the largest wave of Google+ invites and the brief user-to-user invite opening.

Users Still Coming In, but Visting Less

While the continued growth in the number of registered users is fascinating and, for Google fans, exciting, the actual amount of traffic is less so.  According to a Chitika study, traffic peaked on the 21st of July and has been declining since. This is most likely due to the end of the initial rush of excitement.
Does it mean that Google+ is in jeopardy? Certainly not yet, it doesn’t. If the decline continues for several more weeks without leveling out, it could well mean that Google+ just isn’t sticking for users. However, the more likely scenario is that the visits will stabilize after a while (days, maybe weeks) and then start a more gradual climb.

Google Plus, Facebook competition may be years away

Though Google Plus has potential to compete with Facebook, but the promised Google Plus vs Facebook competition may be years away
Google Plus is gaining strength very fast. The social networking platform from search giant Google opened its gate to general traffic last month after remaining invitation only for several months before its launch. Since then its traffic has gained momentum and its popularity is soaring.
Though it is too early to say that it is a challenge to social networking behemoth Facebook, nonetheless it has the potential to gain further market share if Google continues to improve it and doesn’t make the same sort of mistakes that Facebook made in the last few years.
Facebook is under immense criticism from many sides on the new changes, especially the ones that are related to privacy of the users. There have been many credible reports on how Facebook continues to track its users by third party applications even a user has logged out of it.
This shocked many a users, some of them say they are going to shift to a new social networking platform, preferably Google Plus to avoid such tracking and compromising on their privacy.
Meanwhile initial statistics about Google Plus acceptability are impressive. Matt Tatham of Hitwise says, “This is good growth…Obviously, when they opened up the site, it did really well. It’s down from that initial peak, [but] now they just need to sustain this traffic growth month over month.”
In the first week following the opening of Google Plus for general public, Google Plus got 14.98 million visits from United States alone. Though it was down to only 7.2 million visits next week, but it was still good and showed that there was lots of potential in Google Plus.
But the new social networking platform still lacks attraction for many a visitors. A reader says, “I was early in on G+ and a vocal proponent, being an avid FB hater. But I deleted my G+ account the day before it opened to the public. FB bloze, but for the time being none of my friends post anything on G+ – they all post rabidly on FB so I only check there .. moving forward if I sense that most of my friends are posting to G+ I will reopen my account .. maybe .. but probably not.. I’m about done with all of it honestly”.
Another reader has this to say, “The people who are tired of Facebook are people who are bored with social networking.  NOT people who are looking for what is basically an exact clone only with WORSE privacy features.  (If you think Google isn’t selling your private information…which they have LOTS more than Facebook does…to advertisers at a premium once they can put a name and even a face to your data, than you are completely out of touch with reality.)”