Google Plus Users Spent 3.3 Minutes or 4.95 Million Hours- You Decide

Google plus is creating more ways for you to share content, but is it enough to get people to stay on the sight? New reports are saying that people are using G+ mere minutes per month vs. Facebook which is nearly 8 hours. Does this mean the decline of Google+ or that the new social network is still fighting for its place on the playground? or is this just one way to present the data without giving you a full picture of what is really happening on the site.

When you create an average, a huge influence on the outcome will be the pool from which you are basing your numbers. So the question becomes, is the usage time really dropping or is the pool getting bigger? Lets dig into some basic math to tease this out.

In October there were 40 million users. November usage report said the average use time was 5.1 minutes.

Here is the equation:

We are solving for X. X being the number of minutes spent on the site.

According to a little reverse engineering of the math, and jogging my Algebra brain, in October/November people were spending a total of 204,000,000 minutes on the network or 3.4 million hours.

In January there were 90 million users, so more than double than October, and the average usage was 3.1 minutes.

Lets go ahead and reverse engineer that math as well.

So this means that there were 297,000,000 minutes spent on the network or 4.95 million hours.

So yes the average time spent on the site decreased by 2 minutes. But the total time on the site increased by 46% or 1.55 million hours.

So do I think that Google Plus is on a decline? No. I think that the network has a steeper learning curve than Facebook and with all the new users coming to the site, that it just might take them a little while to get the full hang of it. Lets give the newbies a little bit of time to get use to the new network before we jump to conclusions on the success or failure of Google Plus