Google+ Hits 300 Million Active Monthly “In-Stream” Users, 540 Million Across Google

As expected, Google touted the growth of its “social layer” Google+ during a special event today that also saw the introduction of 18 new features.

The big numbers that Google talked about are as follows:

540 million monthly active Google+ users: This is the number of people with Google accounts that interact with Google+ each month in some way on any Google property. That could include leaving a comment on a blog or website that has Google+ comments embedded, commenting on YouTube, or clicking the +1 button on an article or some other web content.

Here’s the chart Google used showing the growth in this metric:

300 million monthly active “in-stream” users: This is the number of people that see/visit the Google+ content stream. It’s also considered by many to be the closest thing to the “monthly active users” that other sites (like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) report, although I think it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison in many ways.

Photo & Video Sharing On Google+

Google VP Vic Gundotra also shared some numbers about photo and video sharing on Google+:

• There are 1.5 billion photos uploaded to Google+ every week.
• Google has seen a 20x increase in the number of videos being uploaded to Google+.

On that photos number, I’m assuming that includes all photos — including ones uploaded privately, uploaded automatically for backup storage, etc.

And on that video number, I didn’t hear him share a baseline — 20x of what?

Nonetheless, it’s been a long time since Google shared any usage numbers for Google+, so this is welcome news today. For more from the event, see Danny Sullivan’s live blog coverage.