Google CEO Larry Page confirmed earlier user predictions during the company’s quarterly earnings call on Thursday. The site’s 10 million+ members share over one billion items each day, said Page, implying a high level of activity among registered users.
Facebook and Twitter boast hefty leads at the present time: Twitter has over 300 million users while Facebook has more than 750 million. Both of them took much, much longer to reach the 10 million user benchmark, however, but they were minuscule companies at launch, whereas Google is already a colossal corporation — as its financial results demonstrate.
Google earned $9.03 billion in revenue during the second quarter, a 32% increase over the same period last year. Google-owned sites generated $6.23 billion (69%) of that revenue, while Google’s AdSense program was responsible for $2.48 billion (28%). Average cost per ad click increased roughly 12% year-over-year.
“Google is a company unlike any other… despite its size it has retained its agility,” commented one Google investor on Page’s Google+ post. “Bureaucracy is inevitable in a large company, but for its size it is doing remarkably well.”
Initial reactions to Google+ have been largely positive, with critics and users praising its ‘Hangout’ video calls and intuitive ‘Circles’ groupings. “Not surprisingly [Circles] has been very well received, because in real life, we share different things with different people,” said Page.
Google+ is still in “field trial with limited access.” Its invite-only barrier limits its growth, though the allure of ‘being on the inside’ likely adds to its appeal among potential users. The site is already the fastest-growing social network of all time, reaching the one million and ten million user benchmarks with blazing speed. And if Technology Incubator Idealab CEO Bill Gross is accurate, Google+ could reach 100 million users faster than any service in history.
