Empty. Flickr/Timo Newton-Syms Nobody is using Google+. At least, far fewer people than you might imagine. Analytics and visualization blogger Kevin Anderson has charted information about Google's social-networking platform and found that despite billions of sign-ups, hardly anyone actually does anything on it.

Anderson studied data compiled by Edward Morbius, who says that just 9% of Google+'s 2.2 billion users actively post public content. On Ello, Morbius writes that based on his research, between 4-6 million people engage, interact, and post publicly on Google+. Anderson's analysis covered January 2015.

Morbius cites a Re/Code interview from last year with Google+ boss Dave Besbris. In it, Besbris says, "I don't want to talk about numbers," and Morbius questions whether he's "hiding something." It appears he is.

Here's a summary of his findings:

There are about 2.2 billion Google+ profiles.



Of these, about 9% have any publicly posted content.

Of those, about 37% have comments on YouTube videos as their most recent activity, and another 8% have profile-photo changes.

Only 6% of active profiles have any posted activity in 2015 (18 days so far).

Only about half of those, 3% of active profiles, are not YouTube posts.

In other words, 0.2-0.3% of all G+ profiles, about 4-6 million users, have made public posts in 2015.

Morbius explains his research:

This is an analysis which estimates active G+ users, defined as those who've made a post to G+, not simply commented on a YouTube video, in the month of January 2015. It's based on pulling Google's on Profile sitemaps and sampling profile pages based on them. You should be able to replicate the process yourself (or with a hackishly-minded assistant) using the methods described.

Anderson visualized Morbius' data to produce this graph:





Both parties concede that the numbers only take public content; private posts or comments remain uncovered. "But it's a pretty clear indication of publically visible activity," Morbius stresses.

Morbius also notes the importance of YouTube in all of this. Of the profiles where people use Google+, 37% do so through a YouTube video. Another 8% simply post a profile-photo change. Indeed, as Morbius looks through profiles and activity, he concludes that the low percentages "tell us why Google was so eager to combine YouTube and G+ comments — it's doubled the G+ activity."

From his 2015 analysis particularly, Morbius covers hundreds of Google+ profiles in detail. One poignant statistic is this: "We've got a grand spanking total of 24 profiles out of 7,875 whose 2015 post activity isn't YouTube comments but Google+ posts. That a 0.3% rate of all profile pages, going back to our 2.2 billion profiles." Clearly, without YouTube's help, Google+ would seem even less popular.

"No wonder Dave Besbris doesn't want to talk about numbers," Morbius writes.

Morbius finishes with some caveats:

I'm a space alien cat living outside the solar system. I don't have any conflicts of interest, other than a considerably growing distrust of Google. I use G+ actively myself, and find it useful, though limiting and exceptionally frustrating. And I dislike FaceBook far more.

The conclusions here are based on sampling and I've seen them shift by a few million as more data rolls in. Still, I'm pretty confident that the total number of publicly posting (not commenting, which could well be far higher) users is well below 10 million for January 2015.

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