Email and webmail statistics
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Those preparing introductory presentations on email marketing are often short of two bits of information. The first is a clear outline of the value of email marketing. The second is background statistics on email usage and the popularity of different webmail services. The article Why do email marketing? meets the first need, and the following compilation of numbers and anecdotal evidence addresses the second...
Webmail providers
There are no official statistics comparing the user numbers of the different web-based email address providers. Nevertheless, there is enough information available to make some clear statements about the relative popularity of different services.
The leader is Yahoo! Mail, closely followed by Microsoft's Hotmail (now called Windows Live Hotmail). Thereafter it gets more uncertain. Gmail is often cited as the third "biggie," but the number of active accounts still falls well short of either of its two largest competitors. This may change in the future, of course.
The details...
A Yahoo executive noted in February 2008 that "we're the largest single e-mail provider."
The claim is backed up by data from competitive intelligence service Hitwise:
- As of January, 2008, the most popular email websites (based on US Internet usage and in descending order of popularity) were: mail.yahoo.com, mail.live.com (Windows Live Hotmail), gmail.com and mail.aol.com (see current rankings.)
- In a February, 2008 blog post, analyst Bill Tancer lists the US market share of the three top email services. Yahoo Mail comes out way on top, followed by Windows Live Hotmail with Gmail a distant third.
- In a May, 2007 post, research director LeeAnn Prescott reported that Yahoo! Mail's market share of visits in April 2007 was just over double that of Hotmail's. And 13 times that of Gmail's market share.
Interestingly, the data also suggests that email is a far more important part of the Yahoo and MSN web properties than Google's. The mail-related domains are the most popular at both the Yahoo and MSN portals (see reference), more popular even than the portal index page. While Gmail accounts for a tiny proportion of visits to Google (see reference.)
In January, 2007, Tom Kulzer of AWeber reported the results of an analysis of "over 43 million opt-in web form requests" managed by the company (reference.) He lists the top 20 domains by percentage of requests, with the top 4 being Yahoo.com, Hotmail.com, Aol.com and Gmail.com. Yahoo.com accounted for almost five times as many addresses as Gmail.com.
In terms of actual account numbers...
An April, 2008 USA Today article cites ComScore Media Metrix figures for February, 2008:
Microsoft webmail properties: 256.2 million users
Yahoo: 254.6 million users
Google: 91.6 million users
AOL webmail properties: 48.9 million users
In February, 2008, a Yahoo executive claimed the company served 260 million email users.
In October, 2007, an official Yahoo! blog cited statistics suggesting Yahoo represented 255 million of the world's 543 million webmail accounts.
In a company blog, a Senior Product Manager notes that Hotmail has "260+ million existing customers." and a news report from April 2007 states, "Hotmail provides more than 280 million e-mail accounts, 20 million of which are Windows Live Hotmail." This number is also mentioned in Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail Fact Sheet, which says, "...one of the largest e-mail services in the world with more than 280 million active accounts."
Writing in August, 2007, Microsoft blogger Omar Shahine noted that "...on Windows Live Hotmail we are hosting about 200 million accounts."
A February, 2007 article in TechCrunch gives user numbers for Yahoo! Mail (250 million), Hotmail (228 million) and Gmail (51 million), but does not cite the source of the numbers.
An unofficial blog on Google gives account numbers in this post, but the source of the numbers is not publicly available. It places Yahoo Mail and Hotmail first and second, respectively, with Gmail as the fourth biggest webmail provider.
Do not, though, expect the email addresses in your own email lists to necessarily reflect the relative popularity of different webmail services. The popularity of each service differs, for example, between regions and demographics.
Webmail providers like Gmail and Microsoft may also be behind some other domain names, either through POP3 retrieval of email from other accounts or through email hosting services offered to businesses and organizations which retain the latter's domains (see this blog post for more detail).
General email usage
There are numerous estimates of typical email use and email traffic from various sources. Here just a few for you:
- According to Pew Internet and American Life Project data from March, 2007, 91% of US Internet users have gone online and sent or read email.
- The same source suggests that 56% do this as part of a typical day.
- An October 2007 report by technology market research firm The Radicati Group estimates that there are 1.2 billion email users in 2007, expected to rise to 1.6 billion by 2011.
- An October 2006 report from the same source suggests that some 183 billion emails were sent each day in 2006 and that wireless email users will grow "from 14 million in 2006, to 228 million in 2010."
- Ferris Research estimates the number of business email users in 2007 at around 780 million.
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