Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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November 06, 2007
Social networks overtake webmail
For the fist time last month, UK Internet visits to social networks overtook visits to web-based email services. As the chart below illustrates, our custom category of the top 25 social networks, which includes Facebook, Bebo and MySpace, accounted for 5.17% of all UK Internet visits, compared to 4.98% for Computers and Internet – Email Services, which includes Hotmail; Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, amongst others.
This confirms that social networks are starting to eat into the web-based email providers’ dominance of the internet messaging market. A growing proportion of the UK online population is choosing to communicate with friends via social networks rather than email. We illustrated this recently with regards to the charity website JustGiving, and also highlighted the volume of traffic that Social Networks are sending to retail sites this year in the run up to Christmas. In fact, it’s happening across the board: as the chart below illustrates, social networks now also refer as much traffic to other websites as web-based email services.
It’s interesting to see that age clearly plays a role, with younger Internet users preferring social networks, while older surfers choose email. The graph below illustrates the user-base of Windows Live Mail and Facebook, respectively the most popular web-based email service and social network in the UK.
Posted by Robin Goad at 11:00 PM
Posted to Social networks
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Comments
I'm not surprised that older users choose email as the social networks you mention seem to be aimed at the younger market.
Us oldies (?!?!) like email as we don't end up getting invited to become zombies etc...
Posted by: John at November 7, 2007 07:03 PM
I'm sure this is turning some executives on their heads. One interesting data point is the 35-44 demo, seems they are the slowest to jump onto the social networking wagon.
Posted by: Matt at November 8, 2007 02:54 AM
It might be worth factoring in the growth of broadband in the UK. When you're on dial-up then you want to download your mailbox. Once broadband is available, webmail is much more attractive. But (and you'd need to check this) I think boradband only really took off in the UK in the last five years i.e. just as social media was starting to pick up. So webmail may never have garnered the same level of users in the UK as in the US.
Posted by: Mags at November 8, 2007 02:11 PM
I agree, 35-44 datapoint is interesting and is bit sad that they are so slow in recognising the importance of social networks.
If you look from monetary perspective, this age group has the best buying power, therefore involving them would make social networks more attractive as marketing platform.
Posted by: Rytis Sileika at November 12, 2007 10:36 AM
Fascinating - it bears out a remark by Six Apart's Mena Trott from two years ago when she was explaining the vision for Vox. The target was explicitly to replace e-mail for communication between family members with internal Vox messaging.
As for the 35-44s, a fifty-year-old observed to me recently that many of her colleagues in this age range were quite slow at picking up new online developments, as they were too busy (read: tired out) with work and young families.
Posted by: Colin Donald at November 15, 2007 03:14 PM
Interesting trends, I'm what your research define as old guy. I'm old with young soul :) Old guys goes to web early, when the web access was trough expensive dial up connections. E-mails was the cheaper way of interaction, of the XX century. With the advent of broadband connection, the interaction come from stand alone desktops to interactive and early social networks. The delayed interaction of emails comes to real time interaction of social networks and IM (so IM is not new, I've got my ICQ on 1997). I think this trend continue to growth, and faster, so the world come to be ubiquitous connected. The question now is what is the future of our privacy?
Posted by: João Carlos Caribé at December 2, 2007 05:07 PM
I'm not so sure that the last graph shows that old people use email -- that's a strong extrapolation when it just says that Windows Live users are pretty even across demographics.
In other words, I'm not sure I believe Windows Live Mail is representative of all email users. Curious to see if that trend holds up with Google/Gmail.
Posted by: nabeel hyatt at December 3, 2007 04:36 PM
