Google+ Loses 60% of Active Users 519
First time accepted submitter tech4 writes "Despite users' curiosity around Google+, it seems like most Google+ users just wanted to see the platform before returning to Facebook. 'Google has lost over 60 per cent of its active users on its social network Google+, according to a report by Chitika Insights, raising questions about how well it is doing against its rival, Facebook. Despite the clear interest in an alternative to Facebook, it does not appear that the people joining are staying around and actively using the web site. Google's problem is not getting users in the first place, it seems, but rather keeping them after they have arrived. For now it appears that a lot of users are merely curious about Google+, but return to the tried and tested format of Facebook when the lustre fades. The problem is that Facebook is not going to rest on its laurels while Google attempts to get the advantage. Already it has added features inspired by Google+, particularly in terms of improving the transparency of its privacy options.'"
Facebook has the users and the games. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's that simple. The value of a social network lies in having all your friends on it too, and that's true for Facebook but it isn't true for G+. Also, Facebook has the games people want to play, while G+ doesn't, so there just isn't much to attract anybody to G+ other than curiosity.
Critical mass (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem is that those of us who want to move to Google+ can't convince enough of our less techy friends to move over. People go where people are. It isn't the best tech that wins but the largest market share. Had Google launched Plus before "everyone and their grandmother" were on Facebook, they would have had a shot, but it's sort of too late.
Google+ is not a social network. (Score:5, Insightful)
Google+ is "primarily an identity service."
--Eric Schmidt
I have no need for an identity service in my life. That's why I left.
Not terribly surprising (Score:5, Insightful)
Social networks tend to accumulate momentum, and fairly slowly. Facebook has a ton of it right now, and Google+ has very little. It's not just in number of users, but in the habits of those users. People are used to Facebook. It'll probably take a year or so for Google+ to start taking off. And you don't really "lose" users, once signed up people always have the option of returning, especially with most of those people already having Gmail accounts.
Also, many people were probably scared off by all the FUD surrounding the pseudonym issue. Once people calm down over that, usage will most likely rise. In any case, we won't know if G+ will succeed or not for at least a year, I would say. Anyone who thought Facebook would be abandoned overnight really needs to learn how the Internet works. It is fickle, yes, but it also has huge inertia, because of the number of people involved.
Idiot marketing scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
This could be understandable if it was their first shot at social networking; but Wave had the same problem and they did not learn from it.
Still no Google+ for Google Apps users (Score:4, Insightful)
Many of the early adopters out there are Google Apps users, and yet we still can't use our Google Apps accounts with Google+. I've heard many good things about Google+ but am still waiting for Google to allow me to use it.
And I'm not interested in managing yet another account just to try out Google+.
Don't piss off early adopters. (Score:5, Insightful)
My friends and I joined G+ rather quickly upon its inception. We started having fun on it. It was great.
Then some of our accounts started getting suspended because of violations of a questionable "names policy". The policy said to use the name that people know you by, and those are the names we all used. Apparently that wasn't good enough for Google, though; they suspended accounts anyway, even some with "real looking" Western style names. Once enough people got suspended, the remaining batch of folks that didn't got pissed off that their friends were kicked off the service, and they left voluntarily.
Their name policy was unclear, and people would even get their names approved only to get suspended again later on by a different overzealous admin. It was chaos.
I think the lesson to be learned here is don't alienate your users, ESPECIALLY early adopters. We can make or break a social network.
Facebook may require real names, but at least they were absolutely clear about this from the start. They were not wishy-washy, and didn't mass-suspend new accounts like G+ did.
COMMERCIAL ACCOUNTS (Score:5, Insightful)
The biggest problem Google+ has right now is how they have been dragging the ball on commercial accounts, meanwhile enforcing the real-name policy. It is an incredibly braindead move because you are effectively locking all companies out of participating on Google+, and thus they are unable to bring any users over with them.
A follow a lot of brands on twitter and simply can not do the same on G+. If everyone I followed on Twitter existed on G+ I probably would not use Twitter anymore, but sadly Google is ACTIVELY PREVENTING that from being the case due to this braindead policy enforcement.
Methodology? (Score:5, Insightful)
What methodology is this company using to measure activity on Google+? If it's public posts, they may have a serious systemic problem: people who use G+ specifically because it's so easy to not post publicly. My guess is the majority of G+ users are posting only to their circles, in which case there'd be a plethora of stuff that Chitika Insights simply won't see.
Re:Google+ is not a social network. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Critical mass (Score:2, Insightful)
You can tell yourself this if you want, but the fact is that Google+ doesn't offer anything over Facebook that people want. After all, this story says people did try Google+ but that they didn't stick around.
Dishonest as fuck (Score:5, Insightful)
Google+ had its numbers go up by 1200% upon opening to the public. Of those new users, 40% stuck around, for a net increase of 480%. Slashdot's headline? "Google+ user base down 60%! It must be dying!" I've seen powerdrills with less spin.
Re:Critical mass (Score:5, Insightful)
I also think part of the problem is that Google bungled the launch. When it was first opened up to the public and it was as hyped as it was ever going to be, it was invitation-only and invitations were scarce. By the time they opened it a few weeks later, many people had already turned sour. In the mean time, Facebook has made improvements to counteract many of the selling points of Google+.
With social networking sites, you have to go big at the start. Once you get people thinking, "My friends aren't on this," you're dead.
Re:Idiot marketing scheme (Score:5, Insightful)
Gmail was very successful with it's invitation system: it was elitist, and everyone ached to get in...
What your analysis misses is that Gmail actually addressed a pressing need in the free email marketplace: space. On top of offering an order of magnitude more storage than its competitors, GMail also brought distinct improvements to the email paradigm (tagging, search, spam filtering). That allowed it to attract users from Hotmail/Yahoo and even private web hosts.
If I knew what the pressing need of the social networking marketplace was, I wouldn't post it on Slashdot. Facebook was weak in terms of privacy and controlling the spread of your information, but G+'s circles weren't a killer app. And everything else on G+ is just a Facebook clone.
I wouldn't count G+ out just yet. It's Google after all. Those millions of inactive users could quickly become active if G+ somehow jumps ahead of the curve.
Re:Critical mass (Score:4, Insightful)
Google+ is built around privacy.
Which is why you get banned if you use a pseudonym or otherwise fake name. Heaven forbid you might be one of MANY who lead two lives for whatever reason, like someone who hasn't come out of the closet yet and keeps his official life very separate from his online life.
For the record, no, my real name isn't Calydor - but when I'm online I can assure you that's the name I respond to, and I'm not going to risk losing my GMail account in this name by trying to go to G+.
Re:We want something new but the same. (Score:5, Insightful)
> Until everyone is on Google, nobody's going to Google
No, masses are irrelevant for success, G+ had to win those "leader" type of people who helped FB win, the high-influence college crowd, the trendsetters, the queen bees who basically get to decide what will used, the rest will simply have to passively follow like worker bees. FB was wildly successful long before everybodys aunt and grandma joined, because frankly, nobody cares about them. FB had the important (private) college crowd and thats all they wanted. The aunts and grandmas simply followed.
G+ made the fatal flaw in their strategy not to identify what made FB successful in the first place, getting high-value people on board first. They thought that an G+ account itself had enough worth to play the "invite only" gamble, but this was so wrong. The worth of an social netwrk account is not measured by features of the account itself, but by "which indispensable people are exclusively on there". Nobody indispensable was exclusively on G+, so G+ had no power to force the masses to abandon FB in order to not be cut off from their influential peers on G+.
Then Google made the next fatal flaw to massively fuck off early adopters, who _did_ bother to go where nobody has gone before and to make an account. The early adopters were people who were fed up with FB's privacy breaches and looked for a more moderate alternative. They were not just amazed b G+ features, they looked for a second, less intrusive home. And what did Google do to those terraformers, who were supposed to turn into evangelists and make G+ attractive to non-members? Google started threatening and deleting their accounts, forcing "real names", talking about an perverse "identity service" under which no anonymous thought will be allowed to be expressed. The attack against enthusiastic early adopters gave everybody a sense of things to come, that Google+ will not be better than FB in any imaginable way privacy wise, that their ego is already inflated so long before they have a large enough user base to justify it. There will be no second wave of early adopters, the news has already been spread that the new master is as ruthless and abusive as the current master, so theres no point in relocating.
By Googles own actions, it became clear that FB just isnt that bad as everybody thought before G+.