MailChimp has posted an update on their email providers trend: the number of emails their platform sends to each major email provider including AOL, Yahoo, Hotmail/Outlook.com, Comcast and Gmail.
Last year, no less than three of those email providers were running very close to each other: those were Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail.
However, last month Gmail had over 100 million more active accounts being sent to by MailChimp than Hotmail: quite a big difference! The raw numbers are 536,377,176 for Gmail versus 428,019,961 for Hotmail.
Here’s the email provider statistic running from July 2011 through to July 2012:
Even AOL has grown by about 40 million, from about 59 million to 98 million last month.
The post does mention to take the numbers not too seriously:
I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out some potential skewing of the numbers. For instance, we only track emails sent to some of the domains used by the email providers. We include hotmail.com and hotmail.co.uk, but not live.com, outlook.com, and some international domains. Google Apps users with private domains aren’t included either. So consider with a grain of chocolate salt — which is delicious, by the way.
Even so, the post does give some insight in the shift in webmail providers’ user base over the past 12 months. I wonder whether Microsoft can turn the tide with Hotmail now rebranded as Outlook.com.
One of the reasons Gmail has been growing so fast could be the number of Android devices being activated on a daily basis, needing a Google account (most of the time created with a Gmail email address): over 400 Million devices have been activated so far, with 1 Million being activated every single day. Wow!
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