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[ Email and Webmail Statistics ] By Mark Brownlow

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 public 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. Thereafter it gets more uncertain. Gmail is often cited as the third "biggie" but this is not necessarily supported by the numbers. And even if it is third, 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...

In a September 2006 press release, Yahoo cites comScore Media Matrix data establishing it as the "No. 1 Web mail service in the world".

This claim is backed up by data from competitive intelligence service Hitwise:

• As of November, 2006, the most popular email websites (based on US Internet usage and in descending order of popularity) were: mail.yahoo.com, mail.myspace.com and hotmail.com.
  
  
• In a May, 2006 blog post, analyst Bill Tancer lists the percentage of all visits to email services by US Internet users accounted for by each service. Yahoo Mail comes out way on top, followed by MSN Hotmail and MySpace. Gmail is a distant fourth.

Interestingly, Tancer's data also suggests that mail 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, more popular even than the portal index page. While Gmail accounts for a tiny proportion of visits to Google.

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. 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, the only info I could find was from an October 2005 Hotmail factsheet issued by Microsoft which claims "Since its launch in 1996, MSN Hotmail active accounts have grown to more than 200 million worldwide".

An unofficial blog on Google gives account numbers in 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.

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 December, 2005, 91% of US Internet users have gone online and sent or read email.
  
  
• The same source suggests that 53% do this as part of a typical day.
  
  
• A fall 2006 study by Mediamark Research Inc. revealed that 70.5% of US adults with internet access had "used email" in the last 30 days. This was the top activity among those surveyed. The second most common activity came in at 40.2%.
  
  
• An October 2006 report by technology market research firm The Radicati Group estimates that there are "1.1 billion email users and 1.4 billion active email accounts worldwide".
  
  
• The same report 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 2006 at just fewer than 600 million.

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