Google Promises These Are Real Google+ Usage Numbers

Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) has announced that its social network, which seeks to rival Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), now has more than 100 million dedicated monthly active users. Google senior vice president of engineering, Vic Gundotra, made the revelation on his own Google+ page while announcing the acquisition of Nik Software, a firm that develops digital image-editing tools.

Don’t Miss: Is Google Digging Its Own Grave?

“We couldn’t have imagined that so many people would join in just 12 months,” Gundotra wrote.

The search company launched Google+ in the summer of 2011 as a direct competitor of Facebook, which recently reported having 955 million monthly active users.

Google has been fairly unclear on how it counts active users of Google+ and has often ended up announcing a higher monthly active user number by including the users of other company services such as Gmail.

Gundotra said in his latest post that the current figure was related to just the Google+ site and its mobile app. The executive added that the site now had 400 million registered users. He elaborated the statistic, in response to a user’s comment on the post, that the latest numbers reflected the use of Google+ as a destination. “The numbers at I/O were Google+ users all across Google,” the executive wrote, referring to the 150 million figure the company had announced at its developers conference. “So Gmail users who used circles, or Android users who plus-one’d an app, etc. were included. Today’s number of 100m is just on our plus.google.com destination site and the mobile app. Pretty amazing.”

Catalysts are critical to discovering winning stocks. Check out our newest CHEAT SHEET stock picks now.