Having YouTube’s one hundred billion monthly pageviews isn’t cool. You know what’s cool? Facebook’s estimated 1 trillion pageviews.
Despite Google’s attempt to introduce a new service on the social media market and grab their own piece of the social pie, Facebook continues to grow. Google’s latest rough estimates say the social site is now getting around one trillion hits per month, with YouTube and Yahoo following shyly in the distance.
Obviously, Google’s Plus can’t hope to compete with Facebook’s pageviews at this point since it’s still a relatively small, invite-only beta service, but that’s not the issue here. The problem is Google Plus has lost its shininess and people are already losing interest in it (myself included). Figures released by this guy say traffic to Google Plus has dropped 37% in the past 18 days. Now, I don’t know how accurate that traffic analysis is, but even if the drop is only 15% instead of 37, that’s still a drop, and quite a significant one at that.
Personally, I’d love to use Google Plus instead of Facebook, because I trust Google more than I trust Facebook, but at this point Plus doesn’t bring enough new stuff to the table to warrant a switch. The simple circle design is cool, but not cool enough to be essential. So unless the final version of Google Plus will have features that will make me and others wonder how we lived without them for so long, its downward trend will probably continue – while Facebook will get even more users and pageviews.
It would be a shame if Plus tanked, though, because it has so much potential.
