BETA
This is a BETA experience. You may opt-out by clicking here

More From Forbes

Edit Story

Dear Google, It's Not You, It's Us

This article is more than 10 years old.

Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife

comScore dropped a lollapalooza on Google last week with its finding that as of January 2012 users were spending only 3.3 minutes on Google+ per month, on average.

The shockingly low number—at least when compared to what the average Facebook user spends on its site—inspired Chitika Insights to conduct a follow up study focusing on activity coming out of Google+. It will release its results on Monday.

The news, again, is not good for Google.

Chitika Insights analyzed ad impressions coming out of the Chitika Ad network over the past several months using a referrer distribution.

It’s finding? There is an overall 31.67% decline in activity when comparing current Google+ traffic levels to four months ago.

It may not be Google’s fault, however, at least not entirely, unless one can hold against it unfortunate timing.

A Saturation Point

Chitika thinks that one of the factors behind the decline in Google+ activity is that people in general are reaching their saturation point with all things social media. We have LinkedIn, we have Twitter, clearly we are in love with Facebook. And apparently there is room for novel approaches to this space, such as Pinterest. But your standard, straightforward social network, no matter how glammed up with Hangouts and Circles? Maybe not.

Google, not surprisingly, did not accept comScore’s figures and is unlikely to accept Chitika’s, or its conclusion.

“Google thinks about the service not as a site but as a deepening of its relationship to billions of existing users who are already committed to Google’s services,” it said in a statement after the comScore numbers were released – and, “by this measure, engagement is already enormous.”

1B Users, But From Where?

There is definitely something to this notion of saturation, least in the West:  in January 2012 iCrossing predicted that by August 2012 Facebook users’ will have hit the 1 billion mark.

It also concluded that Facebook’s growth has morphed from an exponential rate to that of a linear fashion—and much of that is occurring in emerging markets.

"Facebook's growth has slowed or stopped in many of its early adopting countries such as the US and the UK," it says in its blog post. "However, developing countries such as India and Brazil have shown strong growth with India growing from 22 million users to 36 million and Brazil going from 13 million to 30 million in the last 9 months."

Certainly the possibility of social media saturation is something that other social network providers--or would be providers--should consider.

Microsoft, for example, is taking a cautious approach to its latest social media experiment, So.cl, which actually is part social network, part search engine.

There are those cases, of course, where caution need not be applied: There is speculation that Apple plans to revitalize its sorry social network, Ping, via its acquisition of app search engine Chomp. In the case of Ping, there is nowhere to go but up. Also Lady Gaga is expected to roll out her social network, Little Monsters, this Spring. And for her, the ordinary market forces of supply and demand simply don’t count.