Google+ has had a strong first month, but it's possible some of the novelty has worn off. According to stats from Experian Hitwise, traffic to Google+ has taken a dip in the last week.
According to Hitwise, total visits to the new social network dropped to 1.79 million for the week ending on July 23, a three percent decline from the previous week's 1.86 million total visits. The amount of time people spend on the site has also decreased by 10 percent, to five minutes and fifteen seconds from five minutes and 50 seconds the week before.
Hitwise noted that most of the traffic to Google+ (59 percent) came from other Google-owned properties. Google.com drove 37 percent of traffic to G+, while Gmail was responsible for 15.59 percent of traffic, a nine percent increase from the last week.
Google+ is also an increasingly male-dominated social network, Hitwise said. Last week, 59 percent of visits were from men, up four percent from the previous seven days.
In the last month, a third (33 percent) of visits came from users ages 25-34.
Check out our Google+ ReviewTraffic might have dropped last week, but it's still early in the game for Google+, which Google launched in a field trial on June 28. So far, most of the numbers have been promising. On Friday, comScore said Google+ had ramped up 20 million unique visitors in its first three weeks.
Google's CEO Larry Page is optimistic; in an earnings call about two weeks ago he confirmed that
Estimations aside, even with a drop in traffic, it would be premature to make any predictions about the fate of the baby network.
Update: Google reached out to PCMag to say that Hitwise's reporting is incomplete. Read about it here.