The latest not-really-that-important web statistics show that Google’s GMail web mail service is now the third largest in the US.
What’s more surprising is that it had to overtake AOL to get there.
AOL? Why do so many people still use AOL?
The top two webmail providers are Hotmail, with 47m unique users, and Yahoo! Mail, with a whopping 106m.
As with so many other services online, Google looks like it could be the one to beat, seeing a 25% growth in unique visitors over the past year, compared to Hotmail’s 8% increase and Yahoo’s 16%. (AOL dropped 22%. About time).
In fairness, though, this is something Yahoo! is doing pretty well. Perhaps Hotmail and Yahoo Mail should merge just to stave off GMail for a bit longer.
July 2009 stats courtesy of comScore.
That is surprising indeed. I didn’t expect to be waiting for this long to read the statistics. It does go to show that it does take a while for a relatively new provider to climb the ladder.
In AOL’s defence they did do a lot to improve the interface
I’m pretty sure Google is leading the ballgame right now :)