According to a study by the Jupiter Research company, the last 6 months of 2004, between 52–56 percent of the new customers of Gmail came from Hotmail. I know I like the Gmail service and have switched over to it as my sole webmail client. Of course, I have many pop3 email accounts, but I really like Gmail for it’s features and reliability. The report says that about 24% came from Yahoomail, and the rest were small numbers from a wide range of other email services. You can read the full story at BetaNews. Here is an excerpt.
One possible explanation for the disparity is that Google’s Gmail has offered 1 gigabyte of storage free to its users since the service was put into public beta. On the other hand, free Hotmail users were only given 2 megabytes of storage until late last year. But Jupiter Research senior analyst warned about making predictions based on third-party data. “While the switch rates appear to be high, I would caution against making trend predictions based on a single vendor’s service,” he said. “What if higher Net-tenured or tech-savvy users primarily use the service and also happen to be the most-likely Google switchers?”