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.
