Google+ had 5.4B users on paper — but 90% of sessions lasted under 5 seconds

Google+ launched on June 28, 2011, as Google's answer to Facebook. It was an aggressive product: YouTube comments required a Google+ account, Gmail contacts became Google+ circles, search results showed Google+ posts. The strategy inflated user count to 5.4 billion 'monthly active users' by 2013 — but this counted anyone signed into any Google service. The real number of people actually posting and sharing was a fraction of that. A 2011 study found the average user spent 3.3 minutes per month on Google+. Facebook users spent 7.5 hours.

Google+ had a fundamental design problem: it was engineered from Google's data perspective, not from a user's social perspective. Circles were too complicated. The stream was always empty unless you spent hours curating. There was no viral loop — nothing that made users want to post or return. By 2015, Google+ was a ghost town with expensive servers. A 2018 internal memo revealed that 90% of user sessions lasted less than five seconds. The product existed because Google was too proud to kill it.

The end came from a security crisis. In October 2018, Google disclosed an API bug that exposed 525,000 users' private data. Then in December 2018, Google revealed a second bug that exposed 52.5 million users' data for six days. Google had known about the first bug since March 2018 but had kept it secret to avoid regulatory attention. The disclosure forced Google's hand: it shut down consumer Google+ on April 2, 2019. The project that had cost hundreds of millions and consumed Google's social ambitions for eight years ended with a quiet server shutdown that almost nobody noticed.