Google+ grows 27% in March according to new data
Earlier this year Google+ was labelled a ghost town after comScore visitor data revealed that members of the social network spent approximately 3 minutes per month on the site.
New data from traffic monitoring service Experian Hitwise is countering these claims however. CNet report that traffic to Google+ actually rose 27% between February and March of this year, seeing a total of 61 million people visit the social network during March.
Hitwise produced the following chart to show the rise in traffic to Google+ according to their data, which is derived from a sample of Internet usage from a number of Internet Service Providers that provide anonymous data to Hitwise.
Hitwise regards 1 visit as the number of visits to a site in a 30 minute window. So if someone visited G+, then went off to CNN for 15 minutes before returning to G+, that would be 1 visit. If they went off and browsed other sites for 31 minutes before returning however that would be 2 visits.
On Thursday Larry Page, Google CEO, claimed that Google+ had more than 100 million active users, although he failed to clarify how he defined an active user.
The level of activity fell under scrutiny after comScore released data showing that users spent just 3.3 minutes on Google+ in January compared to 7.5 hours for Facebook.
Google, which took issue with that data, asserted that 50 million users access “Google+-enhanced” products daily and that 100 million do so once per month. However, “Google+-enhanced” includes YouTube, Google Play and the company’s homepage.
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