Although Google announced it has 90 million users just a couple of weeks ago, many analysts, social media enthusiastic fans and other sorts of tech geeks (nothing personal, I’m one myself) are tracking closely the progress of Google+, trying to estimate if it already crossed the 100 million users mark.
In terms of real value there isn’t much difference between 90 million or 100 million users, so why is it so important? The 100 million users mark has a great psychological effect which symbolize something really big and achieving it in such a short period of time (Google+ is just 7 months old) can indicate on something huge.
So, in order to decide if indeed the social network (i don’t care what Google are calling it, its a social network!) has reached for this milestone, i turned into the unofficial statistician of Google+, Paul Allen (which already proved to be pretty accurate before) and i also made an analysis of my own.
Paul Allen: Google+ Already Passed The 100 Million Users
Paul Allen has published a Google+ post yesterday, where he is revealing that according to his estimating model (basically analyzing Google+ surnames relatively to the overall population), Google+ already has 100.8 million users and it is advancing at a 750K new users rate in each day. Meaning that today, Google+ already stands at 101+ million users!
With the current estimated growth rate, by the end of the year Google+ will have 345 million users. However, Paul Allen has repeated his prior forecast of 400 million users by the least at the end of 2012 due to accelerated users joining rate expectation.
My Analysis: Much More Than 100 Million Users
To be more accurate and sure, i conducted an analysis of my own by using the free site analytics tools, Compete. What i did is compared Facebook traffic stats from December 2011 (which we know had 845 million users back then from Facebook IPO filing) to the traffic stats of Google+. I know, possibly inaccurate but it still an indication…
Compete is showing that during December 2011 Facebook had 171,581,636 unique visitors and Google+ (plus.google.com) had 20,033,731. If we divide Google+ traffic by Facebook traffic, we get 11.68%. When we multiply it by Facebook’s 845 million users, we get that Google+ had about 98.7 million users in December 2011.
If considering that between October to November 2011 Google+ traffic increased by 15.4% and between November to December by 40%, then we get that today Google+ has between 113.9 to 138.2 million users! At any case, it is much more than 100 million users.
