Duncan Riley reports at TechCrunch that Yahoo! Mail is still the more widely used email service than GMail this Christmas.
A chart below (taken from TC) shows a ComScore report of unique visitors on Yahoo! Mail versus GMail from November 2006 to November 2007.

Rough estimate Yahoo! getting close to 250 Million unique visitors each month for the entire year. However, the trend looks like it’s mostly a flat line without much increase in the figures for the last 12 months. GMail, on the other hand, grew from around 60 Million unique visitors to just over 90 Million in the last year.
Yahoo Mail’s growth rate of 3.21% pales in comparison to GMail’s 56.3%. However, Duncan’s conclusion that at this growth rate GMail will overtake Yahoo! Mail by 2010 is just plain wrong and misleading.
According to the figures, Yahoo! Mail is 3 times the size of GMail. GMail is fairly new in this arena, having been launched in April 2004 while Yahoo! Mail has been in existence for over 10 years now. Of course, due to the small userbase of GMail, its growth rate will be significantly higher than that of the old-timer. I think everyone has had a Yahoo! mail at one time or another.
The 3.21% growth in Yahoo! Mail translates to about 8 million more while with GMail, it’s close to 30 Million during the same period. Here’s my alternate and more believable extrapolation of their growth:
Let’s assume a consistent 30M for GMail and 8M for Yahoo! Mail in the next several years, the formula would look like:
YM (pop) + ( X (years) x 8M) = GM (pop) + ( X (years) x 30M)
250M + X(8) = 90M + X(30)
140M = 22X
X = 6.4 years
Assuming that both growth rates are flat (which is also doubtful), it will take until 2014 for GMail to overtake Yahoo! Mail. In 2010 and 2014, we’ll revisit this figures and see which guesstimates came the closest.


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