Around the Net
Google+ Grows Audience
- Venture Beat, Tuesday, January 3, 2012 11:53 AM
A foregone success or not, Google’s social network is growing. From November to December of 2011, Google+’s total monthly U.S. visits grew by 55%, according to the latest data from Experian Hitwise. What’s more, “Fledgling social network Google+ had its best traffic month ever in December with more than 49 million U.S. visits, a sign that the company’s bet on social is slowing paying off,” writes VentureBeat.
The report is welcome news for Google following several studies showing traffic declines, “with one eye-popping Chitika study in October [which] had traffic falling 60 percent,” VentureBeat notes. Likely driving the turnaround, Google has been incorporating the network into its other products like Gmail and Google Reader. Meanwhile, “Unofficial Google+ statistician and Ancestry.com founder Paul Allen, who has been previously accurate in his tracking, said last week that Google+ now had about 62 million registered users and is signing up 625,000 new users per day.”
Based on the rate of growth, Allen further estimates Google+ should expect to see 100 million users by the end of February, while it could potentially end 2012 with 293 million members.
