How many users actually have Google+

In 2015, only 0.3% of profiles wrote

Edward Morbius conducted a small study of the activity of Google+ profiles and came to the conclusion that very few people leave entries on this social networking site. According to his estimate, only about 4-6 million users have written anything since the beginning of the year. Without being particularly cautious, some publications cited his findings, stating that no one uses the site at all.



The total number of users was determined by sitemap files, it is about 2.2 billion profiles. Only about 9.2% showed at least some activity on the site, that is, approximately 200 million people left records of any kind at least once. About 37% have recent comments on YouTube. The fact is that after combining some functions, the comment under any video gets on Google+. Even at 8.1% of the last entry, there is a change of photo - when you upload a new avatar, a message appears in the tape about it.





Graph created by Kevin Anderson using SankeyMATIC



It is interesting that among active users who have ever written something, 31% have not posted absolutely no records since 2013. In the first 18 days of 2015, only 6% of active profiles wrote at least some text entry. And only in half of the cases it was not a comment on YouTube. As you can see, the merging of some video hosting functions with Google+ helped to inflate the activity - apparently, therefore, Google took such a step.

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In other words, according to this rough estimate, only 0.2–0.3% of all user profiles posted in the first 18 days of 2015 at least some text entry that is not a comment on YouTube. This is about 4.4 million people. The calculations do not take into account and can not be taken into account by users who do not write anything, but only read other people's records. Also fall out of sight accounts posting private records.



The data was obtained by automatic collection of information from the site. Console scripts ran several samples of various sizes: 214, 623, 1195, 6569. At the same time, the share of profiles with any kind of activity, including changing username and comments on YouTube, always remained about the same - about 9%. The total size of Google+ — more than 2 billion accounts — was confirmed by another researcher.



Google itself doesn’t like to talk about numbers, this can be seen from a recent October interview with Dave Besbris. In it, the new head of Google+ refused to answer the question about the number of current users.