Gmail Users Younger, Richer
Kristina Knight passes along research from Hitwise showing that Gmail is gaining on its Internet-based email competitors and is attracting a much younger, net-savvier user base.
Yahoo’s market share is 4.27% while Hotmail’s market share is 1.95% and Gmail’s market share is only 0.39%.
Still, email marketers should take note of the growing Gmail popularity for one simple reason: demographic. Gmail’s demographic is both younger and richer than the demographics attached to Yahoo and Hotmail, making those users a better target for marketers.
In April, 54% of Gmail visits were from users 18-34. Only 44% of Hotmail users and 42% of Yahoo visitors were from the same age group. Also, 18% of Gmail users had a household income of $100,000 or more compared with 15% of Hotmail and 13% of Yahoo users. Gmail users are also more active on social networks (3.7%) than Hotmail (2.2%) or Yahoo (1.2%) users.
I’ve been using Gmail since July of 2004 and a staggering percentage of my email correspondents seem to be doing so as well, so I had presumed that it was a far more dominant force than it is. I had Hotmail and Yahoo accounts years earlier but have let the former lapse and only maintain the latter because it’s linked into a few financial arrangements and older networks.
Clearly, though, bloggers and avid blog commenters–which comprise most of my daily correspondence–are remarkable outliers. I have to remind myself of that constantly.
So, 90%+ of users are going with the email accounts their ISP provides? Or their account(s) from work or school?
I had the same reaction you did James. Nearly everyone I know has a gmail address, and their not just bloggers, but mostly people in the technology space.
Likewise I also have a yahoo address that I only use for spam… when I need to sign up for something and want an account for the registration/confirmation to go to.
But I wouldn’t want to live a day without gmail.
I may fit the younger demo, but I’m certainly not richer. I’m a semi-geek so I felt obligated to have a Gmail account.
I use a web-based e-mail program, Squirrel Mail, through my webhost. That’s because I haven’t bothered figuring out how to forward mail from my address to a Gmail account, and also because I like to periodically download my mail to my desktop computer and use Thunderbird. There’s probably a way to do that with Gmail; I just haven’t looked.
Yahoo recently upgraded its mail service. I’d try it out, but their spam filtering is so bad my long-time address (close to 10 years) is practically worthless.
I believe Gmail can be configured to download your POP3 email into your Gmail account. I know that Gmail can be configured as a POP3 service, for you to download to Thunderbird.
Why would anyone use Hotmail? Unless it has radically improved in the last several years, I don’t get using it instead of Gmail at all.
Some people might be concerned about allowing Google too much power. If you use google to do almost all of your internet searches (a good chance) you might be leary of using the Google desktop and google mail because you’d basically be handing the keys to your entire computer existence to them. Personally I’d rather use mail and forgo the desktop, as I don’t see where desktop searches are either all that critical or all that time consuming.