Google+ growth reportedly accelerating
Paul Allen, unofficial Google+ statistician and Ancestry.com founder is well recognized as the voice of authority on all things Google+. Allen announced in September that he improved his model for analyzing Google’s social network and said that Google+ hit roughly 43.4 million users in September with one in three having signed up in the first two days after the site was opened to the public.
Three short months later, Allen reports that the social network has passed 62 million users, adding 625,000 new users daily. With Google+ growing so rapidly, he makes a bold prediction that there will be 400 million users by the end of 2012 as the network goes mainstream.
According to Allen, his tracking reveals the following growth for Google+:
- July 13 – 10 million
- August 1 – 20.5 million
- September 1 – 24.7 million
- October 1 – 38 million (Larry Page announced “more than 40m users” on Oct 13th)
- November 1 – 43 million
- December 1 – 50 million
- December 27 – 62 million
- January 1 – 65.8 million (forecast)
- February 1 – 85.2 million (forecast)
“What is really remarkable is that nearly 1/4th of all Google+ users (24.01% to be precise) will have joined in December alone,” Allen said. “If this rate of new signups (625k daily) continues then Google+ will reach 100 million users on Feb. 25th and 200 million users on August 3. They will finish 2012 with 293 million users.”
Allen attributes the growth to the 700,000 Android devices activated daily (which he forecasts will also accelerate in 2012), and notes that Google+ will improve in the coming year “as more Google+ APIs are released next year, developers will be able to build experiences on top of Google+ and make it even better.”
Between the developer ecosystem, increased ad campaigns online and on tv by Google and carriers, the social network will most certainly grow in 2012, but Allen believes 2012 will end with over 400 million users on Google+.
