C’mon Google, give us the real Google+ numbers already

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that things aren’t looking so great for Google+. According to data from comScore, Google+’s users spend just about three minutes per month on the site.

On Facebook, that number is closer to six or seven hours per month. Google itself, however, has never provided anybody with any useful data about the service and — at worst — is just using deliberately misleading information to provide the press with big numbers that look good but are absolutely meaningless.

100-million active users?

In January, for example the company’s CEO Larry Page said that the site had 90 million users at that time and that “+users are very engaged with our products — over 60% of them engage daily, and over 80% weekly.” That, however, was a pretty misleading statement. While it may sound that Page was saying that 60% of Google+ users come back to Google+ every day, his argument was simply that 60% of those users who signed up for Google+ also use any other Google+ service on a daily basis. Those numbers said absolutely nothing about the engagement Google+ is seeing from its users.

More recently, Google’s VP for engineering Vic Gundotra — in what is clearly a reaction to the WSJ piece — spoke to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton and once again used the same kind of tactic: “On a daily basis, 50 million people who have created a Google Plus account actively use the company’s Google Plus-enhanced products, Mr. Gundotra said. Over a 30-day period, he said, that number is 100 million active users.”

Google+, of course, is now part of virtually every other Google product, including search, which most of the company’s users probably use on a daily basis without ever trying to actively engage with the company’s social network.

Nice, meaningless numbers

Google is obviously trying to paint a nice picture here by using large numbers that, at the end of the day, say nothing about Google+ and how engaged its users are. Maybe things are great at Google+ and it has a huge, highly active community (though most of us aren’t seeing it in our own accounts). The problem with this is that unless Google provides us with any concrete data, it just looks as if the company has something to hide.