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Yahoo! and Microsoft: UK perspective

February 05, 2008

Following on from Bill’s and Heather’s posts, I wanted to share some UK data on the proposed Yahoo! and Microsoft deal. First up: webmail services, and as the chart below illustrates, Microsoft has a dominant market share with its Hotmail service. While Gmail (GoogleMail in the UK) has gained some traction, its market share has been flat for the last few months. Last week the combined market share of the Microsoft and Yahoo! services was 13 times that of Google.

A category with a more level playing field is news services. I’ve created three custom categories containing all of the news services that ranked in the top 100 News and Media sites in January for each brand – i.e. capturing both UK and US properties, as well as both aggregation and content sites. Again, Google’s market share is extremely flat, while Yahoo! and Microsoft both experience more peaks and troughs in their traffic. Yahoo! remains marginally ahead, although in this case the combined Yahoo! and Microsoft market share was only twice that of Google.

Bill produced a fantastic table illustrating the market share of the three companies’ properties in a number of different categories, so I thought that I’d do the same. As the table below illustrates, Yahoo and Microsoft together have four of the top 10 Business and Finance sites, and combined they account for almost one in five visits to the category. Google Finance ranks well outside of the top 100 Business and Finance sites in the UK and therefore currently poses no real threat to Microsoft and Yahoo!, but the situation is very different for maps. As you can see from the table, Google captures almost half of all internet visits to Maps websites in the UK and, even when Google Earth is excluded, Google properties have over six times the market share of the Microsoft and Yahoo! properties combined.

There are a couple of interesting things that come out of this analysis. The first is that all three companies get UK traffic to both their UK and US sites (and other national sites too, ranging from Poland to Hong Kong). The split between these properties varies depending on the subject, the maturity of the service, and each company’s strategy. Taking the Business and Finance sector as an example, it is interesting to see that Yahoo’s local UK site receives almost three times as much traffic as its US site, but for MSN, the US site is actually more popular.

The second interesting point is that, outside of the categories described above and a few more, Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google have less market share of content sites in the UK than in the US. The exceptions to this rule are: Photography, where Yahoo’s Flikr is also ranked second and Google’s Picasa sixth; Rewards and Directories, where Yahoo’s Kelkoo is number one; and Movies, where the Yahoo! and Microsoft sites have lower market shares than in the US, but still at least rank in the top 10.

Elsewhere, the strength of local brands pushes the big three much further down the rankings. These brands include the BBC and other media companies, but also specialist brands in sectors such as Dating and Employment. For example, Yahoo has three of the top 5 Sports sites in the US, but Yahoo! Sport UK and Ireland was only ranked seventh in the UK last month, with a market share of 1.28%. Elsewhere, Y! Music’s share in the US is six times its share in the UK, while Yahoo! Hot Jobs ranks 45th in the UK, compared to second in the US. So, if the ‘Yahoosoft’ deal does goes ahead, it won’t just impact Google, but also a range of other companies in niche sectors that will have more to fear from a combined Yahoo! and Microsoft content business.

Tweet Posted by Robin Goad at 05:47 PM | (1) | (1)
In Categories Email | Employment | Financial Services | Movies | Music | News and Media | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Sport | Travel

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• UK Perspective: Yahoo! and Microsoft (Research News Jul 2007- Jan 2008)
  Following on from Bill’s and Heather’s posts, I wanted to share some UK data on the proposed Yahoo! and Microsoft deal. First up: webmail services, and as the chart below illustrates, Microsoft has a dominant market share with its Hotmail... [Read More]

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