Google officially made the announcement in October last year. Google is calling this move part of “Project Strobe,” an initiative they say is a review of their “philosophy” around third-party data access to the Google API.
Officially, as a result of this review, the social platform will be gone by August 2019.
According to the blog post announcement, there are a few reasons why Google is shutting down Google+.
Nobody uses it!
Google Plus had its devoted user base, but for most of us, it was a not included in our online activities.
Google is believed to have said that engagement on the platform was pretty abysmal. 90% of user sessions were five seconds long or less.
The only engaged audience Google+ found was with businesses and marketers.
The business audience valued it for these reasons:
- It’s lack of ads.
- Its uncluttered format.
- Its communication and discussion tools.
- Most importantly: its power for combining social media with SEO.
Unfortunately, this value was not a universal experience. Most casual users on social media want to stay connected with family and friends. And on that basis, Google Plus failed miserably.
Google found an undisclosed bug in March 2018
In their blog announcement, Google buried a little piece of information: They discovered a “bug” in one of their Google+ APIs.
The New York Times reported on this bug, which Google had kept quiet for several months. Why didn’t they mention it? Because it didn’t look like anyone had exploited it to gain access to users’ information. So, Google decided they weren’t obligated to report it under the current laws. When the bug was discovered, even GDPR wasn’t in effect yet.
See our social media marketing course