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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