This weekend a number of media outlets, including us, reported that the number of users on Google"s new social networking service Google+ leaned heavily towards the male gender. The info came from two third party web sites, SocialStatistics.com and FindPeoplePlus.com. Now the analyst who first predicted that Google+ would reach 10 million users in a short amount of time has pretty much slammed those two sites for what he says are inaccurate stats concerning who is using Google+
Paul Allen, who also founded Ancestry.com, posted on his Google+ page that the info on SocialStatistics.com comes from Google+ users directly. He states, " ... G+ users can submit their profile to see if they make the top 100 leaderboard. Shortly after launching, the 87% male, 11% female, 2% other stat started making the rounds. But that data is completely skewed: "males tend to compete for leaderboard recognition more than females." As far as FiindPeoplePlus.com, Allen says the site, " ... indexes nearly 948,000 Google+ user profiles and tracks many data points about the users, including gender. They report that of the first 948,000 profiles they crawled, 74.9% are male and 25.1% are female. But crawling is time consuming and the crawlers were finding the mostly male user profiles from the initial field test seeding. This is not a random sampling."
Allen claims that through his own "surname-based random sampling" efforts he found that males currently take up 66 percent of Google+ with females taking up the other 33.6 percent. He adds, "The poster of 18 men in a hot tub that has been passed around for the past week or two is not reflective of reality and is not what Google+ is going to end up being."