Google Plus, since its launch in 2011, has not been as popular as other social networking sites, for instance, Facebook Although its parent company suggests the platform has almost 300 million active users, a recent study conducted by Stone Temple Consulting indicates that the number of active users on Google Plus could be much lower than projected by Google, according to Digital Trends.
Small user base
According to the data from the digital marketing agency, less than 1% of the 2.2 billion Google users regularly use the company’s Plus service. Stone Temple CEO Eric Enge concluded that there exists only 111 million “active users” of Google Plus, which is almost 0.5% of the search provider’s total user base. Moreover, of these 111 million, only 6.7% of them have a minimum of 50 posts on their profiles since they were made, whereas just 3.5 million user profiles were found to have at least 50 posts during the last month of research.
Enge also discovered that almost 90% of Plus users have not once posted anything publicly on the forum, though this is not bizarre considering that a Google Plus profile is automatically generated when they log on to Google’s services.
What went wrong with Google Plus?
Contemplating the problems faced by Google Plus, one ex-Googler claimed that the company’s attempt to make Plus somewhat similar to Facebook has led to its downfall. Another opined that Google was very late in launching its Plus service and looked at it just from a competition point of view. In addition, it is also claimed that the company was sluggish in utilizing the mobile platform through its social networking site, according to a report from Daily Finance.
Also there are views that the company created Google Plus to solve its own issues instead of providing people with a medium to connect with others. But whatever the intent behind designing Google Plus might be, the service served as an efficient medium for easy use of Google’s apps, along with providing a simple method to organize photos online.
Owing to the meager number of Plus users, there are speculations that the company might close down the service soon. This is in line with comments made by Google in March suggesting that the search giant’s social platform will be splitting into two main components, namely, Photos and Streams.
