Story highlights
Paul Allen claims that Google+ now has 62 million users
Allen predicts G+ will reach 100 million users by February 25, 2012
Hitwise: Total visits to G+ hit 9.4 million for the week ending December 17
Paul Allen, a Google+ watcher whose estimates about the social network’s growth have proved accurate in the past, claims that the site now has 62 million users and is adding 625,000 new users per day.
“It may be the holidays, the TV commercials, the Android 4 signups, celebrity and brand appeal, or positive word of mouth or a combination of all these factors,” Allen wrote on his G+ profile page Tuesday, “but there is no question that the number of new users signing up for Google+ each day has accelerated markedly in the past several weeks.”
Allen, the founder of Ancestry.com, takes an unusual approach to come by his estimates: He and his staff run hundreds of queries on surnames they’ve been tracking since July and then extrapolate the size of the network.
At this rate, Allen writes, G+ will reach 100 million users by February 25, 2012 and 200 million by August 3. By this time next year, G+ will have close to 300 million users.