jul 5, 2011 - If Google Buzz Is A Black Hole For Sharing Traffic, Google+ Is The Big Bang

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Back in March of last year, we noted that Google Buzz, Google’s shiny new social network at the time, was getting smoked in terms of referral traffic sent our way, by a dead man, FriendFeed. It turns out, Google’s own Analytics service was undercounting Buzz because it resides in Gmail, which uses HTTPS and strips out referral information. In other words, most Buzz traffic could only be inferred, not seen. Still, after months of looking over the data, I’m not convinced that Buzz actually sends any amount of meaningful traffic whatsoever. The same is not true of the newly launched Google+ so far.

Yes, it has only been out for a week at this point (and is still only available to a very limited number of users), but based on what we’re seeing, the social network is already sending a large amount of traffic our way.

How large? Well, since its launch last Tuesday, Google+ has already cracked our top ten referring sites. It currently resides just behind Digg in that timespan. If you narrow that down to just count July so far (a few days after launch, so more users had time to sign up), the numbers are even better. It would already be the number seven referrer, just behind Hacker News. And it’s already a fifth as large as the leading social referrer, facebook.com.