For close to a year people have been urging Google to announce user figures for its social network, Google+. Google finally came clean during Google I/O and revealed that Google+ has surpassed 250 million total users.
More than 150 of those users are active on the social network each month and half of those (75 million) sign in every day -- not bad for a site that's just about to celebrate its first birthday.
The world's biggest social network, Facebook, was founded in 2004 and is home to more than 901 million users. It has more than 500 million monthly active users, 526 million of whom sign in every day.
While many news outlets have claimed that Google+ is a “ghost town,” user engagement is actually fairly high, with the average active user spending around 12 minutes a day, says TechCrunch -- or 360 minutes per month -- perusing their feed. For comparison, Facebook users spend around 441.3 minutes per month browsing the site via the mobile browser and Facebook app.
TechCrunch notes that "It's important to remember that Google has some weird ways of calculating stats, so some of these 'active users' could be people engaging with social features on other Google properties, or just clicking +1 buttons."