Hitwise was good enough to do a survey of traffic to the major e-mail sites. While the traffic to Google's Gmail (NASDAQ: GOOG) seems to be growing faster than it is to Yahoo! Mail (NASDAQ: YHOO) and Microsoft's Hotmail (NASDAQ: MSFT), the lead of the two older products may be insurmountable.
Champions of Google's ability to dominate most markets that it enters will likely grab on to the 17% increase in traffic from February to April 2007. But, Gmail only opened access to all interested users in February. Before that, users had to be invited by other users. Also, as the stat people like to say, the big increase in traffic was from a small base.
Visits to Yahoo! Mail are still thirteen times greater than Gmail visits. Although Gmail users tend to be younger, their income is not much different from users of the other two services.
Hitwise points out that Gmail users are more likely to use Facebook, but why anyone would care about that seems beyond easy analysis.
The survey shows one thing, and one thing only. Gmail is well behind its two major competitors.
Douglas A. McIntyre is a partner at 24/7 Wall St.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-12-2007 @ 3:10PM
guynamednate said...
Interesting, I use Gmail primarily as a web directory and beccause it has POP3 access so I can get my mail through Outlook (which means Google ain't making a dime off advertisements from me). I also have a Hotmail account but it does not offer POP3 so I rarely use it.
If Hotmail did offer POP3, I'd use it and Microsoft would still be making some advertising dollars off of me because they will sometimes insert ads at the bottom of an e-mail. Just thought the two approaches were interesting especially for a customer with my usage pattern.
5-12-2007 @ 8:24PM
Kev said...
I shifted from my default ISP email in 2004 and began to use web based GMail. I continued for a couple of years, then at the start of this year I migrated to Windows Live Hotmail (WLM)for its ability to have emails on my mobile telephone here in Australia. Nothing wrong with GMail, the user interface is a bit boring, and there's plenty of storage. I have concerns for any software that has been in "Beta" for 3 years and can't get it right as is the case with GMail. At the end of the day, they're all just a bloody email conduit and either way crap gets through that non of us want.