25m Google+ Visitors Says ComScore As Social Use Surges

Google+ is believed to have surpassed 25m visitors, with the latest figures from tracking firm comScore suggesting that the new social network is thundering at full speed toward Facebook's head start. The new estimate – including over 6m visitors from the US – indicates that Google broke the 25m barrier in less than a month of operation.

Back in late July, comScore's last batch of stats claimed that Google+ had seen 20m visitors. Official usage figures are in shorter supply, however; Google has only said that it has 10m registered users, though that number was mentioned back on July 14 and is likely to have grown significantly in the intervening period. The discrepancy in the various counts is in part down to what each organization is measuring: Google counts registered users of Google+, while comScore looks at overall unique traffic to the site, including those visitors who look at public posts but don't necessarily have their own accounts.

Still, it's an impressive figure nonetheless, though industry analysis VP at comScore Andrew Lipsman suggests there are benefits to more gradual growth, such as experienced by Facebook. He points to Facebook's original path of more managed user acquisition, and suggests that the site saw "the most stable growth" out of the social networking services.

Whether that will impact Google+'s long-term performance remains to be seen. Some have suggested that the service's growth is slowing, though those figures failed to take into account the fact that Google released a native iPhone app and some of the users might have migrated from browsing to Google+ in the desktop over to their smartphones.

[via LATimes]