Gmail Nudges Past AOL Email In The U.S. To Take No. 3 Spot.
Good thing Gmail is out of beta. It is now the third largest Web mail service in the U.S. In July, Gmail nudged past AOL Email with 37 million unique visitors compared to 36.4 million for AOL, according to comScore estimates.
Context & Ripple Effects
This ranking flip has been years in the making on both sides. Google spent 2007-2008 closing Gmail's feature gaps — coverage in late 2008 catalogued what Gmail already did better than its rivals (what Gmail does better than its competitors) after an earlier debate over whether Gmail would ever get offline access (offline access questions). Dropping the beta tag removes the last label keeping corporate IT from treating it as production software.
The loss stings AOL at a moment of strategic flux: the company closed its $850 million Bebo acquisition last year, is pitching Socialthing's lifestreaming and chat as an answer to Facebook Connect (testing it on AOL Music's theBoot), split AIM for iPhone into free and paid tiers, and faced unconfirmed reports of another round of layoffs earlier this spring. A slipping mail ranking pressures the one property still anchoring its legacy audience.
First-order effects
- Per comScore's July estimates, AOL Email falls to No. 4 among U.S. Web mail services with 36.4 million uniques versus Gmail's 37 million — thinner reach for the display-ad inventory AOL sells against, and a marquee win Google can cite with advertisers.
- Gmail exiting beta in the same window converts the ranking from curiosity into a procurement signal: businesses evaluating hosted mail now have a top-three U.S. service with a finished-product label.
Second-order effects
- AOL's counterweight is engagement beyond the inbox — Socialthing's lifestreaming against Facebook Connect and Bebo integration — effectively repositioning mail as a feeder into a social graph play rather than a franchise defended head-on.
- When monthly unique-visitor tables decide bragging rights, rivals will lean harder on comScore-style measurement itself, touting stickiness and engagement wherever raw visitor counts flatter them less.
Third-order effects
- If the migration pattern holds, U.S. webmail consolidates around properties backed by search-and-advertising engines, pushing legacy ISP-portal mail toward commodity hosting with little pricing power of its own.
- The longer shift is email becoming identity infrastructure: the contested asset stops being whose inbox you read and starts being whose login credentials authenticate users across the web.
The trend: Free U.S. webmail share is consolidating around search-giant-backed services, eroding the mail franchises of the dial-up-era portals.