According to comScore estimates, Google’s web-mail service is now the third most popular in the US, as reported by TechCrunch. Gmail found itself knocking AOL out of the top-three recently with 37 million monthly unique visitors.
Gmail’s user base has grown 25 percent in 2009, while AOL’s declined 22 percent.
In the top spot was Yahoo Mail, which had a massive 106 million monthly unique visitors, having grown 16 percent in 2009. Next to Yahoo in the rankings was Hotmail with 47 million monthly unique visitors, having seen a growth of just eight percent in 2009.
This shows that while Gmail is still behind the top two, it is growing at a much faster speed. It could be poised to take over in the not-so-distant future.
Gmail was launched in 2004, and began as an invite-only free web-mail service. It was expected to take Gmail quite some time to catch up to Microsoft’s very popular Hotmail web service, but it seems it has found itself in a heel-biting position much quicker than expected.
Google’s web-service has certainly upped the ante through very cool e-mail innovations, including the Google Gmail Goggles, which, when enabled, asks the user a series of mathematical questions to ensure they are not MWDing (mailing while drunk). The tool is only active late at night, when people need it most.
Some of its innovations have been more useful: the ability for friends to leave voicemails in your inbox, massive amounts of storage space (currently at 2757 megabytes per user…approximately), mobile access, excellent spam filters, free POP and IMAP access to all Gmail users, faster speed, and the ability to tag e-mails thus making searching through them a far less mundane task.
Much of Google’s innovation comes from suggestions from its users. The neat thing is, they listen. They listen so well, it seems, that back in June 2008, Google launched the Gmail Labs, which allowed intrepid engineers to come up with cool applications for Gmail and ship it as a Labs feature. This is smart not only on Google’s part, who came up with a way to attain innovation without having to pay for it, and for engineers with far too much time and creativity on their hands.
Yahoo and Hotmail, meanwhile, have been highly criticized for their lack of innovation over the past few years.
However you serve it up, Gmail is undeniably rising in the ranks, and rising fast. Yahoo and Microsoft had better give their search innovations a rest for a bit and get to work on their web-mail services if they want to keep ahead of Google.
Kaila Krayewski is a freelance journalist with a passion for all things internet. Having worked for nearly two years as the public relations manager for an internation search engine optimization company, and publishing hundreds of articles (how-to, informational, and otherwise) on SEO, she knows a thing or two about the field. Furthermore, having just started up her own website blondetraveler.com, she is doing her best to keep one step ahead of the search engines in order to keep the traffic flowing.
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