And You Thought Gmail Was Popular? It Only Holds 5% of Email Clients Usage

Today CampaignMonitor has published results of their latest initiative - survey of email clients usage. To make it possible they simply tracked all the emails generated by their users and how recipients opened such emails. The results are rather interesting: while I knew that Outlook was supposed to have the largest share, I never expected Gmail to be so very much behind the leaders. Since the company analyzed more than 250 million of email openings over the last 6 months, I guess the volume of information is quite sufficient to be able to come to conclusions here.

Of course there’s nothing surprising here with the leader - it is obviously Microsoft with 33% jointly for Outlook 2000, 2003, Express and further 6.1% for Outlook 2007. Besides, Microsoft has a very strong position with the web-based email clients market: Hotmail is on the third position with its 16% which was something of a surprise to me personally as you don’t regularly here people talking about Hotmail for their email.

All in all, when it comes to web-based email clients the situation is quite intriguing: while we keep talking about how good and smooth and sexy one’s Gmail experience is, Yahoo Mail is so very much more popular that it holds the second position in the overall email clients usage with its huge 16.5%. Than again we have Hotmail which is only slightly less popular with its 16%. And these two figures are really impressive if we compare them to Gmail with its 5.1%. Basically that means that Gmail is more than 3 times less popular than Yahoo Mail is - no matter how much more hyped it is.

To me it is quite a surprise: I knew that Gmail was not the leader in the game and I realized Yahoo Mail was more popular but the extent was not clear. But come to think of it, I believe that this simply proves once again that geeks and early adopters still don’t rule the world online and regular people still choose the products they love and have used for ages - especially since the products keep getting better with further features - and they will never care that every smallest functionality added to Gmail Labs will get much more attention than the biggest announcement about Yahoo Mail ever gets. Really, people don’t care about what technology bloggers think is cool - or rather they only care when they themselves think it is cool as well.