Google announced Thursday that it generated at total of $9.72 billion during the third quarter of 2011, a 33 percent increase over the $7.29 billion the Internet giant earned during the same period last year. Google Chief Executive Larry Page also announced that the company’s Google+ social network now has a total of 40 million users.
“People are flocking into Google+ at an incredible rate,” said Page in a statement, “and we are just getting started!”
Google’s GAAP net income for the third quarter is $2.73 billion, an increase over last year’s third quarter income of $2.17 billion. Operating income also rose to $3.06 billion, up from the $2.55 billion earned during the third quarter of 2010.
One major area of growth for Google is its mobile business, which brought in revenue run rate of $2.5 billion, up from $1 billion a year ago. Android, Google’s mobile operating system, is currently the most-used mobile OS in the United States, beating Apple’s iOS 2-to-1, according to recent estimates.
The 40 million number for Google+ is the first we’ve heard since the social network launched at the end of June. By August, an estimated 25 million users had joined the site, and that was well before it had officially opened to the public.
When Google did open Google+ to the masses late last month, traffic spiked a staggering 1269 percent. According to analytics company Chitika, however, Google+ had lost 60 percent of its traffic by this week.
Whether or not Google+ can become a true competitor to Facebook remains to be seen, of course. A user base of 40 million, while far from Facebook’s 700 million, is still very respectable. Facebook took three years to reach the 25 million threshold. But that was without the benefit of being run by the most visible web property in the world.
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