20 Million Visitors Later, Google+ is Off to a Good Start

It’s not Facebook – indeed, it’s not even MySpace yet – but Google+ is off to a very good start. According to the latest data from online analytics company comScore, about 20 million people visited Google+’s website in the 21 days preceding July 19. It’s important to note that comScore counts unique visitors to the site and not actual users, but this is still a very good number for Google’s nascent social network.

According to comScore, interest in Google+ also continues to grow quickly. Just in the week before July 19, Google+ saw an 82% increase in unique visitors compared to the previous week and a 561% increase compared to two weeks before.

Comscore google plus total users

But I Thought Nobody Visited Google+?

Just a few days ago, an Experian Hitwise report purported to show that only 1.8 million people visited Google+ over the seven days prior to July 16. That number always seemed off to me, but as always, we have to take all of these numbers with a grain of salt. My gut feeling from watching the activity on the site is that the comScore numbers are closer to the truth, but of course, we can never know.

Big in India – Not so Big in Japan

Where do these people come from? Unsurprisingly, the U.S. leads the pack here with over 5.3 million visitors, but interestingly, India ranks second with 2.8 million visitors. As always, it’s hard to predict where in the world a social network will really take off (Orkut in Brazil is a good example for this). Here is a full run-down of Google+’s worldwide visitor numbers:

Google plus unique visitors by country

As far as demographics go, comScore only looked at data from the U.S., however. Here, the organization found a similar split between men and women who visit the site as other studies: 63% of visitors are men, 37% are women. Chances are that this split is also reflected in the user numbers, though without better data from Google itself, we can’t be sure.

Overall, visitors to Google+ skew young – especially when compared to Facebook where older users now make up a large part of the user base. About 58% of the total Google+ audience is between 18 and 34.

ComScore’s Andrew Lipsman argues that the network effect is only now starting to take hold on Google+ as the networks is still dominated by “the technorati.”