I sampled a random selection of ~50,000 profiles to find out how many were actually actively using the site.
9% of all profiles had ever posted anything at all to the site. This is somewhat fewer that 99.99%.
And only 0.016% of all G+ profiles had posted publicly in the first 18 days of 2015, when I performed my sampling.
https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq
And again, you're talking to the guy who ran that experiment.
Eric Enge of (then) Stone Temple Consulting independently replicated my analysis using a much larger sample of 500,000 profiles, confirming the results I'd found and providing additional details:
https://blogs.perficient.com/2015/04/14/real-numbers-for-the...
I had absolutely no idea Enge was doing this until he published his results. They're a completely independent validation. Which is how science is supposed to work.
Your other comments about G+ are at best speculation, and largely fail to match my knowledge and understanding of the site and service.
Source?
> They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.
Speculation?
Google closed it down because they realize they never needed it. You were rarely providing new information to google because you already had an account and they already were tracking you everywhere. Your posts on other social networking sites google knows about and uses. What sites you visit google knows about.
The only thing google+ gives google is your social graph. But not your friends/family social graph more of your professional social graph. I don't think there was a way to target that info through ads into more profit. They probably leveraged access to facebook's data for ads in exchange for shutting it down.