Google+

Google+ was the social network Google built to take on Facebook. Its user counts, by Google's figures, reached the hundreds of millions, and Google still shut the consumer version down in 2019, citing low usage.

What it was

Google launched Google+ in 2011 as a social network with Circles, for choosing which groups of contacts saw each post, and Hangouts, for group video chats.

Vic Gundotra, Google's senior vice president of engineering, announced it on June 28, 2011, as an invitation-only "Field Trial".

At launch, Wired's Steven Levy reported that "Hundreds of engineers were involved", and quoted Gundotra calling the effort "orders of magnitude more investment, in terms of people, than any previous project". Mashable reported in 2015 that Google+ had "upwards of 1,000" staff and that Google "tied employee bonuses to the success of Google+."

What happened

Google+ signed people up much faster than it got them to use it.

In October 2011, Larry Page, Google's CEO, said it was "now open to everyone" and had passed 40 million users. Gundotra said in September 2012 that over 400 million people had "upgraded" to Google+ and 100 million used the site or app each month, The Register reported. Each figure measured something different.

On April 24, 2014, Gundotra announced he was leaving Google. TechCrunch reported that day, from "multiple sources", that Google+ would "no longer be considered a product, but a platform", and that Google products would no longer be required to integrate it.

Two months later Google announced it was closing Orkut, its older social network. The farewell post said "YouTube, Blogger and Google+ have taken off".

In July 2015, Google said that in the coming months a Google account alone would be enough across its products, and YouTube said it would "no longer require a Google+ profile" to upload, comment or create a channel.

On October 8, 2018, Google announced it would shut down Google+ for consumers, with the wind-down slated to finish by the end of August 2019. The same post disclosed a bug in a Google+ API, found and patched in March 2018, that potentially affected the profiles of up to 500,000 accounts.

In December 2018, Google disclosed a new bug, which it said affected about 52.5 million users. Consumer accounts closed on April 2, 2019.

The version for work and school accounts moved to Currents, which Google shut down in 2023.

Why it failed

Google said it closed Google+ for low usage, and reporting and later analysis agree that few people used it.

What Google said

Ben Smith, a Google vice president of engineering, wrote in the October 2018 shutdown post that Google+ "has not achieved broad consumer or developer adoption" and that "90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds." He also cited "significant challenges in creating and maintaining a successful Google+ product that meets consumers' expectations."

Of the first bug, Google said it found "no evidence that any Profile data was misused."

In December, David Thacker, a G Suite product vice president, repeated the October reasons and wrote that, with the new bug, Google would "accelerate the sunsetting of consumer Google+ from August 2019 to April 2019."

Bradley Horowitz, Google's head of Streams, Photos and Sharing, told Steven Levy in May 2015 that Google had "been less than clear about who that product is good for". In July he wrote that Google had heard it "doesn't make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use."

At launch, Google product manager Shimrit Ben-Yair told Wired, "On Facebook I overshare." Google's shutdown posts don't give Facebook as a reason.

What reporting showed

Ars Technica reported in January 2012 that creating a Google+ account was "often just an incidental byproduct of signing up for other Google services." It said Google had "a habit of presenting statistics about Google+ usage in a misleading way" on its earnings calls.

Users spent 3.3 minutes on Google+ in January 2012, down from 5.1 minutes in November, against 7.5 hours on Facebook, Mashable reported from comScore data, which left out mobile use. The Wall Street Journal put the lack of engagement down to "Google's difficulties in differentiating Google+ from Facebook."

In February 2014, The New York Times called Google+ "like a ghost town". Google said it had 540 million monthly active users, but "almost half do not visit the social network," the paper reported. It said Google required people to sign up to use some services, such as commenting on YouTube, and that "The push is being done so forcefully that it has alienated some users".

TechCrunch reported in April 2014 that "the YouTube integration with Google+ did not go well," and that each integration was apparently claimed at first as an "active user" win until Page stepped in.

On October 8, 2018, the day Google announced the shutdown, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google had chosen not to disclose the first bug that spring, "in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage." The Verge wrote that the decision "follows the revelation of a previously undisclosed security flaw."

What later analysis found

Mashable's 2015 history, based on interviews with more than a dozen Google insiders and analysts, found that Google "launched Plus without a clear plan to differentiate the service from Facebook."

A former employee told Mashable that "people weren't posting, weren't returning and weren't really engaging with the product." The same person said, "The belief was that we were always just one weird feature away from the thing taking off."

Paul Adams, who worked on the Google+ user experience team, told Mashable, "What people failed to understand was Facebook had network effects," and "People didn't need another version of Facebook."

Researchers who tracked Google+ through its first year found that "only a very small fraction of users exhibit any type of activity," in a paper presented at the WWW conference in 2013.

The stage it reached

Google+ never left the introduction stage, because its sign-ups grew while few of the people signing up used it.

Count Google's sign-up figures and Google+ looks like a growth-stage product. I don't count them.

An established company launching into a market Facebook already led is the hard version of introduction. On the product life cycle, Google+ ended as a failure, not a decline.

The lesson

I think the lesson is to count the people who come back, not the accounts you create.

In the introduction stage, bundling can't move that count.

If the leader in your market has network effects, decide before launch what someone gets from your product on day one, before any of their friends arrive. By Horowitz's account four years later, Google still hadn't made clear who it was for.

When the per-user numbers say people aren't coming back, stop shipping features and ask the people who left why.