Google Plus Traffic Went Up 1269% Last Week
New data from Experian Hitwise show a dramatic increase in traffic over the week since the service opened to everyone. Visits to Google Plus increased by 1269% last week. The site received 15 million U.S. visits, up from 1.1 million the week before.
Context & Ripple Effects
Google Plus spent the summer behind an invite wall, and by late July the scarcity was showing up in the numbers: Experian Hitwise data covered in a July analysis showed overall visits declining even as the male share of users rose, while an earlier growth report promised in July had set expectations high. Opening registration to everyone in September was Google's answer to that plateau.
The result is the sharpest single-week move the service has posted: 15 million U.S. visits against 1.1 million the week before, per Experian Hitwise. The measurement firm's weekly tallies have effectively become the public scoreboard for whether Google's social push is working.
First-order effects
- Google Plus converts its invite-only backlog into measurable scale overnight — a 1269% jump to 15 million U.S. weekly visits gives the service its first post-launch traffic baseline untethered from invitation supply.
- Experian Hitwise gains a headline datapoint that frames every subsequent weekly read on Google Plus; the open-registration week becomes the comparison base rather than the artificially constrained invite era.
Second-order effects
- Facebook and Twitter now face a rival whose growth can be quoted in the same weekly traffic terms their own scale is measured in, raising pressure to respond publicly or via product changes aimed at new registrants.
- Third-party measurement firms like Experian Hitwise become the de facto arbiters of the Google-Facebook contest, since Google has not published comparable user figures — whoever controls the traffic narrative shapes perception of the race.
Third-order effects
- If open registration sustains engagement rather than producing a one-week spike, social-network competition shifts from invite-driven hype cycles to audited traffic and retention metrics — a structural change in how the market judges challengers to an incumbent network.
- A sustained Google Plus would push the industry toward treating social identity as infrastructure woven across a company's products rather than a standalone destination, with traffic data as the test of whether that integration works.
The trend: Social-network competition is moving from invitation-scarcity marketing to open-registration scale, with independent traffic measurement replacing company claims as the arbiter of who is winning.