The Race to Become the Webmail & Instant Messaging Leader

Posted by Duke on March 20 at 11:54 AM The value of social networking has been primarily been isolated to community sites such as Facebook and MySpace, but email and Instant Messaging market share trends are providing a much more efficient platform for such a system.  Some recent market share numbers:

Webmail Services

Yahoo Mail: 38%
MSN Hotmail: 37%
Google Gmail: 13%
AOL Email: 7%
QQ.com Email: 5%

Instant Messaging Market Share

AOL: 52%
MSN: 26%
Yahoo: 21%
Google: 1%

What is more interesting is if you consider what happens to the market share with the IM partnerships between AOL/ Gmail, and the 2005 MSN/ Yahoo partnership which has been delayed until this year:

AOL/ Google: 53%
MSN /Yahoo: 47%

The MSN/Yahoo market share is much closer to AOL/ Google than expected.  It is clear form their February bid that MSN wants Yahoo; it is also clear that, despite resistance to that bid, Yahoo needs MSN.

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