This has been a busy week for the social networks. Google+ opened to the public on Tuesday, as well as announced a boatload of new features for the web and mobile, while Facebook, right now as we type this article, is in the process of revealing Facebook Timeline, and additions to their Open Graph. The social networking fight has erupted into an all out war. Since July, we haven’t really had enough data to even back up a guess on the total usage of Google+. We heard from Larry Page a couple months ago that there were over 10 million accounts on the new social network, however, we have had very little information to go on to determine how it has grown since.
Today however, entrepreneur Paul Allen, who in the past had estimated the total usage of Google+, using a model which looks at uncommon surnames, has come out with a new report. Allen’s model estimates that there are approximately 37.8 million users on Google+ as of this morning. This is compared to 28.7 million users just 13 days ago, on September 9th. In addition, Allen has upped his estimates to account for non-Roman surnames, as well as private user profiles, both of which are overlooked by his surname counting model. His adjusted estimate has the Google+ user base at somewhere just over 43 million people. That’s a tremendous amount of growth considering the network launched just about 90 days ago.
Here is a quick look at the estimated total users on Google+ at the specific dates below, using Paul Allen’s surname model:
- July 4th – 1.7 million users
- July 9th – 4.5 million users
- July 12 – 10 million users
- September 9th – 28.7 million users
- September 22nd – 43.4 million users
Allen has also indicated that in the past 2 days alone, since the beta launch of Google+, the user base has increased a dramatic 30%.