Users Spend More Time On Myspace Than Google+

pigrabbitbear writes "Google is boasting that more than 90 million people have signed up for its Google+. Those are pretty impressive numbers. I mean, if you had 90 million people at your disposal, you could do anything. You'd rule the Internet. Except there's one little problem: No one is using the site. The Wall Street Journal has the hard, unfiltered truth: According to comScore numbers, users spent an average of 3 minutes on G+ in the entire month of January. Facebook users spent 405 minutes, or nearly 7 hours, on the site. People managed to find 17 minutes to spare to add connections on LinkedIn. Heck, even Myspace users — many of whom are probably ghost accounts — surfed for eight minutes over the month."

Where did this data come from?

[icebike]

The article is very light on specifics of where this data was obtained, other than pointing at Comscore.

I suspect the original source was this ComScore blog article. [comscore.com] Even that article is very light on methodology.

Quoting:

While Google Plus nearly matches Tumblr from an audience standpoint in the U.S., it does not yet attract similar levels of user engagement on its primary web pages. Importantly, these figures account for activity on plus.google.com and [but] do not include engagement with the Google Plus toolbar or other distributed content throughout the Google network of sites.

Right there seems to be an admission that ComScore isn't able to measure the total engagement, because they can't see it, and nobody needs to access plus.google.com once they are signed up. All the links you need appear on pages protected by https.

The very nature of Google+, with its circles of friends may work against any outsiders having any real access to the amount of time spent there by the average user. and, google's use of https makes this harder still.

These guys are shooting in the dark.

Still, I tend to agree, I only know of a few bloggers who think its cool to hang the little G+ symbol behind their names.

Re:No reason to use it?

[demachina]

If you actually looked at third party URL's being called by random web pages platform.twitter.com and api.twitter.com/xd_receiver.html are becoming extremely common. If Twitter isn't doing tracking with these it would be amazing that they are passing up the opportunity.

Re:evil and EVIL

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Good for you. Facebook is the new evil empire and should be treated as such. Blocking their IP ranges is good, but if you're on a network shared with Facebook users you might also try the Facebook Blocker [webgraph.com] browser extension, which does the same thing -- it keeps Facebook from tracking you through all of those "like" buttons that appear all over the place.

Re:I *liked* G+... but they are driving me away

[cybersquid]

What, are you lazy or just a troll? It takes 10 seconds to find a link to the policy [google.com].