How Google may be stretching the truth about Google Plus

Palo Alto Networks recently released a fascinating study which measured bandwidth of 2000+ businesses over a six month period. One of the categories that their report covers is social media. Of the most illuminating insights was the continued incongruence of Google’s reported user data and third-party measure of the same.

Yesterday Jeff Bullas wrote that Google reported at their I/O conference that Google Plus has 250 million users, 75 million daily users, with users spending 12 minutes a day on site. Comparably Facebook has 901 million active users (logging in once per month), 526 million daily users, with users spending about 24 minutes a day on site. Based upon this data, I would expect that Google Plus’ total bandwidth used would be about 7% of Facebook’s (75 million daily Google Plus users/ 526 million for Facebook multiplied times one half for time on site).

What the data actual shows is that Google Plus accounts for a little less than 2% of the amount of bandwidth used by Facebook users, with the caveat that mobile isn’t accounted for (which is one of Facebook’s greatest strengths accounting for 50% of its usage), despite Google’s claims to the contrary the difference between Facebook and Google Plus is at least a factor of 50 and probably much higher. As much as I appreciate Google and as much as I see the potential for Google Plus – I find it curious that they continue to present fantastic numbers that no independent source is able to verify.

Some other key findings from the study:

- People are spending far more time consuming information on social networks than posting.

- Social networks consume less bandwidth than file sharing apps or even email.

- Despite the gap between its claims and this report, Google Plus actually grew 10 times from last year (from .1% of total social bandwidth to 1%)

- Tumblr showed huge growth from the year previous also increasing ten times (from 1% of total social bandwidth to 10%)

- Pinterest debuted on their study with and impressive 1% of total social bandwidth

While there are clearly some blind spots in a study like this (specifically mobile and home usage) I appreciate the large data set that they used and the novel approach that they use (parsing bandwidth consumption by application) to paint a picture of how people are using social.

Despite Google Plus’ protestations, It’s hard to argue against the current dominance of Facebook after seeing a study like this.

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Thanks for the catch, Chris!

Photo: Hands Credit: Christer Rønning Austad

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Jim Dougherty

Writer and chief of miscellany at leaderswest.com

I aspire to give people something to think about rather than tell them what to do. My favorite Google Alert is “social media research,” I am increasingly compelled by Gen Z, and I appreciate good writers agnostic of where they write. At one time I was Kred’s 12th most influential social media blogger and Klout’s most influential person on the topic of David Hasselhoff. Transplant from Seattle living in Cincinnati. Haven’t entirely adopted the local sports teams yet.