Watch out, Facebook; Google+ membership surges
Source: Mike Swift
Like a flood of concertgoers rushing a club when the velvet ropes go up, the Google (GOOG)+ social network has attracted an unprecedented surge of traffic since Google allowed anyone to join on Sept. 20. The question is whether the show inside will be good enough for all those new arrivals to stay put for very long.
The Internet metrics company Experian Hitwise said traffic on Google+ surged 1,269 percent for the week after Google's decision to open up membership to the 3-month-old site. On one day -- Sept. 21 -- Google+ was the third most popular social networking site, trailing only Facebook and YouTube, and surpassing Twitter.
Meanwhile, Paul Allen, the Ancestry.com founder who has become an unofficial statistician for Google+, estimates the number of people worldwide who have joined at about 50 million, with the social network adding about 2 million members a day.
Google declined to comment on those estimates Tuesday. Since announcing in mid-July that Google+ had attained 10 million members, the search giant has remained resolutely mute about the size of its social network audience.
But Matt Tatham, a spokesman for Experian Hitwise, said the company could not recall such rapid growth for a social network.
"MySpace grew slowly over time, as did Facebook," Tatham said in an email."The one thing that neither of those had was the No. 1 search engine to help drive traffic."
Google last week added a large blue arrow on its search page directing visitors to Google+, and Hitwise said 53 percent of the traffic to Google+ last week came from Google.com -- a 34 percent jump over the previous week. Hitwise data for the entire week -- part of the week was before Google+ opened to everyone, part afterward -- showed the site settling at 8th among all social network sites, up from 54th place the week before.
Hitwise also said that the audience base of Google+ had shifted, broadening to include more middle- and low-income users.
There was a surge in Hispanic users and singles, as well. "This evolution in audience profile indicates that Google+ may be shifting into the "Early Majority" stage," Hitwise said in a blog post, moving away from its initial tech-oriented concentration of people in the 18- to 24-year-old age bracket to a membership more representative of the general population. Despite its rapid growth, Google+ is dwarfed by Facebook's more than 800 million members. And Facebook has already shifted gears from growing its audience to getting members to spend more time on the site, the key way to generate more advertising revenue. Facebook announced a menu of new social software applications at its f8 conference last week, including integrations with digital music companies Spotify and Berkeley-based MOG, video services such as Hulu, and news services such as the Washington Post and Yahoo (YHOO).
Google+ also wants to increase the time members spend on the site and on Monday announced the addition of Zynga's popular "CityVille" game, an epic source of time spent on Facebook. But Google+ cannot yet match the rich array of apps and features Facebook is introducing, such as a Timeline feature that will allow users to store the most important events of their lives in a kind of digital, online scrapbook. Nor has Google+ launched pages for Brands and Businesses, the main way corporations build their presence on Facebook.
Still, proponents say the initial progress of Google+ as it opens up to everyone shows that the newest social network is on track to gain a Facebook-size audience.
Allen, whose analysis of surnames listed on Google+ are the basis for his conclusions about the social network's audience, said in an interview Tuesday that the clash between Google+ and Facebook is a modern Silicon Valley version of the Microsoft versus Apple (AAPL) rivalry of past decades. Two well-funded, fast-growing, highly profitable, "genius-led" companies are going head-to-head, he said.
But now the rivalry is playing out through software running on the Internet, meaning the products and the battle can shift on an almost daily basis.
"It's an incredible moment in tech history," Allen said. "Both companies are going to be around for a long time. Both are going to be major, major players in the world of social networking. ... It's an incredible fight going on."
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