Google Gmail: Hot, hip or third place player?
The blog of LeeAnn Prescott, Research Director at Hitwise, solicits prospective clients to use its: “competitive insights to maximize online marketing programs.”
Prescott’s latest “competitive insights” posted at her blog concern Gmail, asserting:
Users of Gmail are a different breed than the average Yahoo Mail and Hotmail users, which closely resemble the online population in terms of age and socioeconomic status.
How so? Prescott’s stated backup:
Gmail users are much more likely to be young, high income, and in the early adopter segments. For the four weeks ending 4/28/07, 54% of visits to Gmail were from users between 18 and 34, compared to 42% for Yahoo! Mail and 44% for Hotmail. 18% of Gmail's visits were from those with average annual household incomes between $100,000 and $149,999, compared to 15% from Hotmail and 13% for Yahoo! Mail.
How can Hitwise be so sure? 1) The stats on their face are not overwhelmingly convincing of any particular Gmail "strengths" and 2) How were they derived?
After all, Internet measurement competitors comScore and Nielsen/NetRatings have been issued a “Audit Challenge” from Interactive Advertising Bureau President Randall Rothenberg, calling for submission to “third-party audits of their measurement processes.”
Hitwise on its “measurement processes”:
Hitwise has developed proprietary software that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) use to analyze website usage logs created on their network. The anonymous data sent to Hitwise from the ISPs include a range of industry standard metrics relating to the viewing of websites including page requests, visits and average visit length.Hitwise is also able to combine this rich ISP data with region specific demographic and lifestyle information across thousands of website that are reported on every day.
In Web 2.0: What does Pew really know? last week I dissected the validity of The Pew Internet & American Life Project’s definitive assertions about the online behavior of the totality of the American adult populace.
Last August, I asked YouTube, MySpace, Digg stats: Web ‘tabloid’ tease?, citing, among others, a Hitwise July 11 press release hailing MySpace “meteoric rise” defying “Internet laws of gravity.”
Commercial Internet data shops—comScore, Hitwise —and self-serve Web traffic tracking applications—Alexa, Google Trends—supply the blogosphere with continuous fodder for tabloid style headline stories, I noted.
The present Hitwise post on Gmail is not itself of overt “tabloid” style, but it nevertheless inspired the likes of Mashable’s “Gmail users are younger, richer, good in bed” headlined post, which concluded “As for performance in the bedroom - well, we kinda lied. In fact, the stats show that solitary Gmail users are far more likely to Google themselves.”
Really? Even if Hitwise’s data is accepted as an accurate reflection of usage of Gmail, Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, definitive differentiating characterizations of Gmailers vs. Yahoo Mailers and Hotmailers are not a given.
Precise traffic numbers are not stated; “Market share” as reported by Hitwise:
Yahoo Mail 13 times that of Gmail
Hotmail 6 times that of Gmail
Gmail users are much more likely to be young, high income, and in the early adopter segments, is the Hitwise assertion, but derived only from comparisons of widely differing absolute usage, with only minimally differing demographic segmentation.
The Hitwise headline is “Gmail Traffic Up 17% Since Opening Up, Still Early Adopter Appeal.”
Yes, AND in the competitive email scheme of things, Google remains solidly in third-place behind Yahoo and Microsoft, despite its supposedly being a magnet for the young, rich and hip.
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