Sounds a lot like Google+ at the beginning. "We have 100 million users!!!" Well no, you funneled people using search, gmail, and youtube into some annoying screen where they clicked around to make it go away.
This is the "ghost town" ruse all over again. It's weak sauce and demonstrably facile. You can bash Google+ all you want, but it's not going to impress people who enjoy using it very much.
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/02/19/the-loyal-users-of-...
I'd say both interpretations apply.
http://googleblog.blogspot.ca/2013/10/google-hangouts-and-ph... (at the very bottom)
Pretty much any decent product has a small number of fans. That doesn't make it "successful" by any statistical standards.
[citation needed]
Weak sauce, I say. It's readily apparent that they are the #2 social network in terms of actual usage.
Put a status message on fb and ask how many of them use g+
Shall I also ask MySpace users how many of them use G+?
Seriously, that "ghost town" bullshit simply isn't going to fly. It's been done to death, everybody's heard it, and anybody who is actually, you know, active on Google+ laughs at people who repeat it.
PS. I think you're using "weak sauce" incorrectly.
Not at all: http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=weaksauce
Metafilter is quite successful, but also very, very small.
I think I've re-shared three things over the last three years, commented on maybe twice that, and I'm not sure I've posted a single original post there.
I'm almost completely disconnected from whatever “community” G+ purports to offer, and at least one of the G+ profiles that I have was only created so that I could do hangouts with folks in the company (and we end up using Skype more often anyway).
So yes, it's exactly what Google did.