Google+: what 500 million upgrades really measured
A launch and a large headline
Big distribution can get people through the door. It cannot make them care enough to stay. That is my reading of the Google+ story in this Instagram post. The interesting part is the distance between an impressive headline and the behaviour underneath it. For a creator deciding where to put their work, that distance deserves a closer look.
Wikipedia lists Google+ as launched on 28 June 2011. By December 2012, Google was reporting more than 500 million people who had upgraded. Those are two dated points in the story, rather than a record of how an audience developed between them. The announcement gives the larger number a specific label: upgrades. Keeping that label attached changes how I read the headline.
An upgrade count sounds like an answer to the question of scale. A content decision needs something more specific. If I am choosing a home for a recurring series, I want to understand the activity that happens there: what someone opens, what they come to do and whether my work fits that purpose. These are questions I would bring to the numbers, rather than conclusions about the people behind them.
Short sessions, carefully read
The Wikipedia page attributes to Google, in its discussion of the 2018 shutdown, the statement that 90% of user sessions lasted less than five seconds. This is a secondary account of Google's figure. Its unit is a session, so the percentage should stay attached to sessions rather than become a claim that 90% of people abandoned the service within five seconds.
Imagine a person opening several brief sessions and one long session. That is an illustration, not a description of what happened on Google+. It shows why a session percentage and a count of people answer different questions. The reported figure also leaves the purpose of those visits open. I would treat it as a prompt to investigate the experience, rather than diagnose a cause from the duration alone. For my own work, I would pair a duration measure with the action I hoped that particular piece would help someone take.
Three measures in one announcement
Google's announcement of 6 December 2012 puts useful detail behind the headline. It reported more than 500 million people who had upgraded, 235 million active across Google and 135 million active in just the stream. For the activity across Google, it gave examples including +1'ing apps in Google Play, hanging out in Gmail and connecting with friends in Search.
These labels describe different scopes. The largest number counts upgrades; the middle one covers activity across Google; the stream figure refers to a narrower part of the service. I would keep all three labels visible in any comparison. Reading them as consecutive stages of a single funnel would add a relationship that this announcement alone has not established.
That is also a practical editing decision. A headline about 500 million upgrades leaves room to explain the other measures. Replacing upgrades with active users would change the claim before a reader reached the article. When I use a number to make an argument, I want its name, date and scope to survive the trip from source to headline. Otherwise the strongest part of the presentation can become the least reliable part of it.
What I would take into a content plan
Wikipedia records Google+ as discontinued for personal and brand accounts on 2 April 2019. That defines the ending discussed here. The engagement figures belong to their own dates and scopes; I would not turn them into a complete explanation of the closure. The useful lesson for my own work is about making a publishing decision with measures that fit the decision.
For a recurring series, I would first decide what a worthwhile response looks like. A person returning for the next episode and a person encountering one post are different outcomes. I would choose a measure for the outcome I care about, then read it alongside the work itself: the subject, the format and the reason someone would want another instalment. That gives a content plan a clearer purpose than chasing the largest available audience figure.
Google+ makes that habit of reading numbers feel concrete. My takeaway is to ask what an impressive total actually counts before building a strategy around it. For a practical way to compare where your existing content could fit, get Repurposing 101 free by email after confirmation.