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dredmorbius@joindiaspora.com
Doc Morbius (moved to Glasswings)

A Look Back at Google+ User Statistics

This might prove useful for Pluspora and other pods looking for capacity-planning, expansion, and/or limits in light of the #googleplus #exodus

Back in January 2015, after one too many information-free exchanges on how much or little adoption Google+ was achieving, I realised I could form a modest estimate by downlowding a mere 25 gigabytes worth of sitemap files, and crawling a representative sample of Google+ profile pages, looking at the views count and most-recently-posted date for each profile. I did this for about 50,000 profiles, in what seems a suitably random sample. Eric Enge of Stone Temple Consulting was interested enough in the method and results to independently sample 500,000 profiles. (I didn't know of his project until he published results).

Going off Stone Temple's more robust statistics, both 30-day and all-time activity and participation were measured:

  • 100+ posts, past 30 days: ~53,000
  • 50+ posts, past 30 days: ~105,000
  • 10+ posts, past 30 days: 1.9 million
  • 5+ posts, past 30 days: 4.3 million
  • 1+ posts, last 30 days: 16 million

10 or more posts EVER: 21.8 million

(That's a fair cut-off in my opinion for truly active users, and corresponds with the size of almost all pre-Facebook social networks -- 30-50 million was very difficult to exceed.)

5+ posts ever and 1+ posts ever: 32m and 112m respectively.

My gut feel has long been that there's a core of around 50k really active G+ users, though given various cultural and national divisions, it could be an order or two of magnitude larger. I suspect that 5 - 50 million remains a likely scope for a federated network, though it could go higher.

In the Sankey "flow" or "snake" diagram, the active-user funnel is represented. That tall vertical line on the left is not a chart border. That's the 2.2 billion users, 2 billion of whom never posted publicly on G+. The active contingent -- everyone you ever saw post on G+, are the fat bar coming off of that, those who'd posted in the first few weeks of January, 2015, the thread from that, and the fraction who weren't just having YouTube activity re-shared to G+, the whisp at the end. Still 4-6 million profiles, but a minuscule fraction of the total profile base.

@David Thiery @Di Cleverly Ping.

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