How Google+ ranks in traffic compared to other social sites

Google+ is moving rapidly out of the starting gate, but it hasn’t yet caught up to MySpace — or even Classmates.com.

When it comes to just social networking sites, Google+, which launched just three weeks ago, is already in nineteenth place, according to data from Experian Hitwise.

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In the broader category of social sites and forums, which includes sites such as YouTube, Yahoo Answers and Yelp, Google+ comes in forty-second.

These rankings are based on traffic data gathered during the week ending July 16, 2011.

This means that so far, Google+ is still staring squarely at the haunches of sites like MySpace, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, Gaia, deviantART, Orkut and Classmates.com. The fledgling social service did, however, pull in ahead of MyFamily.com, a pay-to-play, private social network for families. You see these networks’ relative sizes in the VentureBeat charts below.

According to comScore, Google+ has seen around 20 million unique visitors, and Google itself is claiming 10 million registered users already.

These data mean that, regardless of who’s ahead of Google+ right now, the service is still the fastest-growing social network in the history of the web. If recent trends are any kind of indicators, we can expect to see Google+ pull ahead of some of the second- and third-tier or niche-oriented social sites in short order.

Still, if Google wants to be a true social competitor, it must train its sights on Facebook, which currently commands around 91% of traffic to social websites.

In other Hitwise data, Google+ was shown to be the 638th most visited U.S. site (a significant jump from its previous weekly ranking of 2404th place), with 56% of its upstream traffic coming from sister Google sites, including web search and web-based email. Hitwise’s data confirm comScore’s stats about users, indicating that the majority of users are relatively young (38.37% of visits are from users between 25 and 34 years old) and male (57% of users have a Y chromosome).

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Top image courtesy of vegaseddie. Charts created by VentureBeat.