The data shows that, on the day of its public debut, Google traffic skyrocketed to peak levels. But, soon after, traffic fell by over 60% as it returned to its normal, underwhelming state. It would appear that although high levels of publicity were able to draw new traffic to Google , few of them saw reason to stay.

(via Failure to Launch: Google Growth Spurt Short Lived | Chitika Insights)

Google+ is turning out to be might be just-another-failed-social-experiment for Google.

I wonder why I can’t convince them to socialize Google’s core tools: Gmail and Google Calendar? Anyone listening?

Update 11:56am: Others have analyzed the math better than I did:

Tim Worstall via Forbes

Note that the traffic jumped before it fell back again: so what’s the result of the interaction of those numbers?

Well, if traffic was 100 when Google plus was invite only, then opening it up to all comers led to a 1,200 percent raise in traffic, then we’ve got traffic of 1,200. A 60% decline from 1,200 leaves us with traffic of 480 (doesn’t matter whether this is users, page views, visits or whatever, the math is the same).

So, what the report is actually saying is that in less than a month traffic has risen 480%, or 4.8 times.

Which isn’t, really, all that much of a failure.

It has been pointed out to me that Chitika is a competitor of Google, as well, and may have an agenda here.

I will revisit this as others come forward with other numbers, but the graph appears to support the idea that the surge of interest has tapered off, even if use is higher than before the opening of the beta.

related

• Google+ Traffic Falls 60% After Public Launch [REPORT] (mashable.com)
• Google Plus Traffic Drops, 1269% Gains Erased (readwriteweb.com)
• Google+ Traffic Drop of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)
• Google+ traffic drops 60% after public launch (digitaltrends.com)
• Google+ traffic drops 60 percent? (technolog.msnbc.msn.com)
• Why the talk about a 60% traffic loss to Google+ is (probably) alarmist nonsense (royal.pingdom.com)