Gmail Overtakes Hotmail in Daily Activity

By Nathan Statz

August 23, 2007: Google’s online email service, Gmail has overtaken Microsoft’s competing Hotmail service in daily activity for the first time.

Gmail has overtaken Hotmail outright in daily page views for the first time. There have been previous instances where Gmail and Hotmail have drawn virtually even, however this is the first instance where Gmail has clearly emerged ahead. The comparison is based on entry pages calculated by web information company Alexa.

The Gmail and Hotmail tussle is really the battle for second place as Yahoo has clear dominance in daily activity, page views and ranking. Interestingly enough Yahoo has been the one provider of the big three that has steadfastly steered clear of the online storage maneuvering which has occurred of late.

In the race to be top dog of the online email provider pack, the usual yardstick of comparison is number of total accounts, yet this doesn’t accurately allow for inactive accounts and multiple user accounts. People forget passwords all the time and dummy accounts are made by people engaged in nefarious activity, so how accurate can total account numbers be to measure which provider is ahead.

IDM reported in a recent article how Hotmail had a clear lead over Gmail in the total user count. According to a February TechCrunch report Hotmail had 228 Million user accounts to Gmail’s 51 million. This significant gap is clearly an inaccurate way of measuring activity as the Alexa statistics show. Despite Hotmail’s obvious advantage in total user accounts, Gmail has quite clearly pulled ahead in daily activity.

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