February 08, 2006

Hotmail Trumps Gmail in UK

I read with interest Chris Sherman's story in yesterday's SearchDay about Google's integration of chat into Gmail and was curious to see the take-up of Gmail in the UK.

Gmail had limited availability in the UK when it was launched, as it was by invitation only and then available to those with a US mobile phone number. There were also some initial problems with the URL, as www.gmail.co.uk has long been in use by another company. In the end, Google went with the brand Google Mail in the UK. These bumps may have resulted in lower take-up initially.

I wasn't surprised to see that UK visits to Gmail trailed those to the more established web-based email services, MSN Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail. In January, Gmail attracted 1.95% of UK visits to Email Services compared to MSN's Hotmail at 57.76%. Yahoo!'s Europe Mail property attracted 14.82% of UK visits and Yahoo! Mail attracted 6.97% of UK visits.

(To be sure we are all clear about the figures I am quoting here, Hitwise tracks visits to websites. The Email Services category that I mention above includes web based email services, rather than desktop email applications, such as Outlook.)

Year on year, we have seen a significant increase in visits to Gmail. Gmail's share of UK internet visits have more than doubled year on year (103% increase within All Categories of websites). Gmail still attracts a fraction of the visits that go to MSN's Hotmail, but the site is growing. The growth seems to be viral, with a steady and gradual increase in visits to the site over the past year. I have a Gmail account and every time I email someone, I am invited to invite that contact to Gmail. The steady growth in UK visits to the site indicates that this tactic may be working as members invite more contacts to join.

I looked at clickstream data for Gmail to get a sense for the sites visited before Gmail in the UK. Gmail received a third (32.95%) of its visits from Google (combined UK and .com properties) in January. This is likely a result of both people seeking out the Gmail service and also people clicking on the link at the top right hand side of www.google.co.uk to "sign-in". The first service on the sign-in page is Gmail.

About 1 in 10 visits to Gmail comes from sites in the Email Services category, again supporting the idea that members are inviting other contacts to join Gmail, and about 1 in 16 visits come from websites in the Net Communities and Chat category.

I also looked at what other Google properties are being visited (other than the search engines of course) among the top 500 websites based on visits from UK internet users in January. The following is a list based of those properties in order of the share of UK visits they receive:
- Google UK Image Search
- Google Mail
- Google Desktop Search
- Google Image Search
- Google News UK
- Google Maps
- Google Earth
- Google Toolbar
- Google - Local
- Google Book Search UK
- Google UK Maps
- Google UK Groups

Many of these sites have impressive growth curves. In particular the share of UK visits to Google Desktop Search increased 38 times year on year in January.

Posted by Heather Hopkins at 04:16 AM
Posted to Search

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Posted by: Ben at February 17, 2006 05:23 AM

Posted by: Everton Blair at November 13, 2006 12:29 AM

Posted by: Heather Hopkins at November 13, 2006 01:07 AM

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