Edible Apple

Google’s struggle to prop up Google+ as a legitimate rival to Facebook is ongoing. The search giant is working hard to leverage their other brands into more Google+ users, and while it’s certainly working in that regard, user engagement on the site remains piss poor.

Highlighting many of the number games Google likes to play when hyping up their take on social networking, Rocky Agrawal looks at the truth behind Google’s attempt to pull the wool over the public’s eyes regarding the success of Google+.

Counting registered users instead of daily active users tells us nothing about the popularity of the service. Think of the millions of people who’ve registered for Google+ but never use it. Second, given the huge popularity of Google search, Gmail, and YouTube, it’s actually surprising that so few people who have registered for Google+ are using those more popular services on a daily basis — only 60 percent. After all, remember that a lot of Google+ users accidentally became Google+ users only because they were already attached to another Google service.

But what concerns me most is that Google is touting these meaningless statistics in the hopes that journalists will misunderstand them and report that Google+ is seeing rapid growth. The bottom line is, those 60 percents, 80 percents and 90 million registered users are just there to mask the fact that Google doesn’t want to tell us how many people are actually using Google+.

At the end of the day, a dedicated and passionate group of small users is far advantageous compared to a large group of users who remain disengaged from a particular product. The challenges Google faces in taking on Facebook are huge, and for a variety of reasons, momentum and luck isn’t on their side.