There’s been a debate raging around whether Google+ has a chance of “winning the social race”. What most people actually mean by this is whether Google+ can overtake Facebook in terms of traffic and engagement. It’s true: Google+ doesn’t match Facebook’s stats, and it currently looks unlikely that they will leap ahead in these metrics.

But the point is:  Google doesn’t care.

Have you ever noticed that Google+ doesn’t have any ads in its stream? That’s because the volume of pageviews is unsurprisingly low, and unlike Facebook, the amount of revenue they could gain through in-stream advertising is not their focus. Google is already in the business of selling ads through their other platforms (Adwords etc.) The more accurately they can target these ads, the more money they can make through these channels.

They have a history of giving us a number of products for free (Search, Gmail, Android, Chrome, Docs etc.) in order to learn more about us, which in turn allows them to serve highly targeted ads to us on an individual basis. Google+ is no different; lots of people signed up for the service and then never used it again. But in signing up, we gave them a missing link in our profile, volunteering biographical data that they couldn’t capture from their other services. Once they have this information, the job is largely done… whether we go back and use Google+ again is irrelevant.

Google+, VP Bradley Horowitz wasn’t lying when he told the Wall Street Journal “We’re growing by every metric we care about”.

Instead of trying to go head-to-head against Facebook, they are simply running in a different race.

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