Good thing Gmail is
out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the
U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique
visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore
estimates. (Gmail is the orange line in the chart below). That puts
Gmail within sight of the No. 2 player, Windows Live Hotmail, which
has 47 million unique visitors. After that there is a wide gulf
separating Yahoo Mail and its 106 million monthly unique visitors.
The
last time
checked on Gmail’s progress was at the beginning of the year,
when it seemed like it would still take at least two years for it to
catch up to its nearest rivals. But so far this year, Gmail’s unique
visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the
two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the
same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy
16 percent).
If Google wants Gmail to pass Hotmail quickly and gain the No. 2
spot, my suggestion is to keep pumping in new enhancements through
Gmail Labs and to speed up the pace at which mail storage increases.
Not that I am a typical user, but I am already at 97 percent of my
allotted 7,358 megabytes. One of the primary lures of Gmail has
always been its seemingly endless and ever-expanding storage limits.
Please don’t make me pay for more storage.
Source:
techcrunch.com
