Google+ jumps to 25 million visitors in record time

The subscriber base for Google+ has climbed rapidly in the last five weeks since the social networking site first debuted. The milestone count started at roughly 10 million. Then it jumped to 20 million.

Now, comScore has announced that Google+ has 25 million  unique visitors as of July 24, which Reuters reports makes Google+ "the fastest website to reach that audience size."

In contrast, it took Facebook about three years to attract 25 million visitors, while Twitter took just over 30 months, according to comScore.

While the data show Google's latest attempt at breaking into social networking has started strongly, it may not mean the project is a long-term success. MySpace grew to 25 million unique visitors in less than two years -- faster than Facebook or Twitter.

CNET spoke with comScore analyst Andrew Lipsman about just what the 25 million visitor mark means.

"Visitors is technically what comScore reports," explained Lipsman. "If someone goes to the URL, they are a 'visitor' but not necessarily logged in as a 'user.' For all intents and purposes, users and visitors should be pretty close. For example, our reporting of visitors for Facebook matches up very closely to their 'active user' counts."

However, the terms "user" and "visitor" are still debatable at this point as one could argue that all visitors are users considering that Google+ is still only accessible by invitation only.

For a more in-depth look at who is visiting Google+ and how often, online marketing and research firm Experian Hitwise has been publishing Google+ user statistics on a weekly basis.

Since mid-July, traffic to Google+ has fluctuated and slightly slipped, but it still remains quite high. However, the overall number of male users has increased to 59 percent, and 33 percent of visits are from users between the ages of 25 and 34 for the four weeks ending on July 23.

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