Technology
The Plus in Google Plus? It’s Mostly for Google
SAN
FRANCISCO — Google Plus, the company’s social network, is like a ghost
town. Want to see your old roommate’s baby or post your vacation status?
Chances are, you’ll use Facebook instead.
But
Google isn’t worried. Google Plus may not be much of a competitor to
Facebook as a social network, but it is central to Google’s future — a
lens that allows the company to peer more broadly into people’s digital
life, and to gather an ever-richer trove of the personal information
that advertisers covet. Some analysts even say that Google understands more about people’s social activity than Facebook does.
The
reason is that once you sign up for Plus, it becomes your account for
all Google products, from Gmail to YouTube to maps, so Google sees who
you are and what you do across its services, even if you never once
return to the social network itself.
Before
Google released Plus, the company might not have known that you were
the same person when you searched, watched videos and used maps. With a
single Plus account, the company can build a database of your
affinities.
Google says Plus has 540 million monthly active users, but almost half do not visit the social network.
“Google
Plus gives you the opportunity to be yourself, and gives Google that
common understanding of who you are,” said Bradley Horowitz, vice
president of product management for Google Plus.
Plus
is now so important to Google that the company requires people to sign
up to use some Google services, like commenting on YouTube. The push is
being done so forcefully that it has alienated some users and raised
privacy and antitrust concerns, including at the Federal Trade
Commission. Larry Page, Google’s chief executive, tied employee bonuses
companywide to its success and appointed Vic Gundotra, a senior Google
executive, to lead it.
The value of Plus has only increased in the last year, as search advertising, Google’s main source of profits, has slowed.
At the same time, advertising based on the kind of information gleaned
from what people talk about, do and share online, rather than simply
what they search for, has become more important.
Brand
advertisers already target ads based on assumptions about broad
categories, like women who watch sports. But the ads can be even more
targeted when web companies know more about their users — say, that a
particular female soccer fan is also a mother who likes thrillers and
wants to buy a home.
“The
database of affinity could be the holy grail for more effective brand
advertising,” said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester studying social
media and marketing.
Google
says the information it gains about people through Google Plus helps it
create better products — like sending traffic updates to cellphones or
knowing whether a search for “Hillary” refers to a family member or to
the former secretary of state — as well as better ads.
“It’s
about you showing up at Google and having a consistent experience
across products so they feel like one product, and that makes your
experiences with every Google product better,” Mr. Horowitz said.
Thanks
to Plus, Google knows about people’s friendships on Gmail, the places
they go on maps and how they spend their time on the more than two
million websites in Google’s ad network. And it is gathering this
information even though relatively few people use Plus as their social
network. Plus has 29 million unique monthly users on its website and 41
million on smartphones, with some users overlapping, compared with
Facebook’s 128 million users on its website and 108 million on phones,
according to Nielsen.
The
company has also pushed brands to join Plus, offering a powerful
incentive in exchange — prime placement on the right-hand side of search
results, with photos and promotional posts.
“It
is literally promotion that money can’t buy,” Mr. Elliott said. “It is
something that Google could make billions off of if they sell that space
tomorrow, and they’re giving it away to try to get people onto the
social platform.”
Starbucks,
for instance, has three million followers on Plus, meager compared with
its 36 million “likes” on Facebook. Yet it updates its Google Plus page
for the sake of good search placement, and takes advice from Google
representatives on how to optimize Plus content for the search engine.
“When
we think about posting on Google Plus, we think about how does it
relate to our search efforts,” said Alex Wheeler, vice president of
global digital marketing at Starbucks.
The
Economist has more fans on Google Plus than on Facebook — six million
versus three million — and its journalists use Plus features like
Hangouts. Yet Chandra Magee, The Economist’s senior director of audience
development, emphasized the value of Plus as a search engine
optimization tool.
“There
is potential there to help us get in front of new audiences,” she said.
“But it also helps with our S.E.O. strategy because our posts on Google
Plus actually show up in our search engine results.”
The
way Google is tying its search engine, which dominates the market, with
a less popular product in Plus has set off antitrust concerns. The
Federal Trade Commission raised the issue during its recent antitrust
investigation of Google, according to two people briefed on the matter. That investigation closed without a finding of wrongdoing.
“If
you want Google search, they’re going to shove Google Plus at you
pretty hard, so the consumer’s forced to take the product they don’t
want to get the product they want,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia
Law School who studies antitrust law and the Internet.
“That
raises big questions under antitrust law,” he said. “It reminds me a
little bit of Microsoft when Microsoft was fearing Netscape and decided
to bend over backward and do anything possible to tie Explorer to their
operating system.”
Google declined to comment on this issue.
Some
Google users have been turned off by the push to sign up for Plus.
Melissa Bright, a business analyst in Houston, stopped using some
products because she did not want to join.
“It just seems really intrusive and easy to accidentally find yourself sent to it at every turn,” she said.
After
YouTube began requiring a membership to comment on YouTube videos, a
founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, deleted much of his account. And
YouTube’s most popular video creator, who goes by the username
PewDiePie, temporarily shut off comments on his videos.
Commenting
on consumers’ reactions to Google Plus integrations, Mr. Horowitz of
Google said, “We are attuned both to what people say and to what people
do.”
And despite what some vocal users have said, few have fled — a sign, perhaps, of Google’s sheer strength on the web.
“If people want to use your platform enough,” Mr. Elliott said, “you can get away with quite a lot.”
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