GMAIL’S POPULARITY: Gmail’s popularity is falling off a cliff.
In September of 2021, they controlled 35.25% of the market.
But by October of 2022, they only controlled 27.95% of the market.
This means that within these 13 months, Gmail’s market share fell by a whopping 7.3%.
This might not seem like a large amount at first glance, but it is when you consider
that basically everyone with an internet connection uses email.
There’s estimated to be about 4.26 billion email users worldwide.
So, this means that Gmail either lost 306 million users or the people who are opening
new email accounts are choosing the other email clients by far.
It’s probably some sort of combination of both, but why?
Ever since gmail launched, the consensus has been that gmail is the go to email client.
Whether we’re talking about personal use, business use, or fake email use, gmail has
been the bomb.
I would even argue that some of the other email clients have had a negative stigma surrounding
them especially yahoo and hotmail.
So, how did Gmail go from being the go to email service to having losing a fifth of
their market share within a year.
THE APPEAL OF GMAIL: To understand why Gmail is losing so much
market share, we’ll first have to understand why they were so popular in the first place.
And for this, we’ll have to go back to April fools day of 2004.
If you didn’t know, Gmail was actually launched as kind of a joke.
In fact, Sundar Pichai, the current CEO of Google, was interviewing with Google at the
time.
And when interviewers asked him about his thoughts on Gmail, even he thought that it
was just an April Fool’s Day joke.
The main reason that this theory was so popular was because Gmail’s offering was simply
laughibly absurd.
At the time, Yahoo and Hotmail offered 2MB of storage and 5MB of storage respectively.
So, when Google came out with 1 GB of storage on April Fools Day, people assumed that it
was surely a joke.
But, April Fools Day came and left and Gmail was still operational.
This definitely caught people by surprise, but Google was just getting started.
In 2005, they would increase the storage to two GB, and in 2007, they would increase the
storage to four GB.
Very quickly, Gmail went from being a joke to being the most desirable email client.
I don’t think I have to tell you the horrors of trying to ensure that your entire email
archive is less than 2 or 5 MB.
But, storage was just the first of many advantages of Gmail.
Gmail also boasted the best spam filters, the best UI, convenient grouping, and ability
to actually search through your email.
Yes, the other popular services didn’t even let you search.
But, while everyone wanted Gmail, not very many people could actually get it and this
brings us to the second appeal of Gmail which was scarcity.
Here’s the thing, offering these crazy storage spaces that were magnitudes above the competition
turned out to be extremely hard.
So, they had to heavily limit the number of users that used the service.
For most companies, this would’ve been a major scaling bottleneck, but Google actually
made it an advantage by making Gmail invite only.
People could only open a gmail account if they were invited by someone who already had
a gmail account.
So, if you had a Gmail account, you were very much the cool kid in the friend group.
It wasn’t till nearly 3 years after the initial launch that Google made Gmail available
to everyone.
By this point, most people who didn’t yet have a Gmail account were dying to switch,
so Gmail’s marketshare continued skyrocketing.
It wasn’t just everyday people who craved Gmail either.
Google was very much getting schools and institutions on board as well, once again thanks to their
features.
For institutions, Google offered custom domain names, zero scheduled downtime for maintenance,
30 GB of storage up to unlimited storage based on your plan, and 24/7 phone and email support.
Once again, Google blew out the competition out of the water, so switching was a no brianer.
But, this was basically the end of the era of voluntary Gmail adoption.
While Gmail was indeed the superior choice, much of the adoption that followed in the
2010s was forced adoption.
FORCED ADOPTION: For people who had already bought into the
Google ecosystem, Google’s strategies throughout the 2010s probably seemed completely harmless.
But, for the people who didn’t buy into their ecosystem, well it was definitely a
pain in the neck.
What Google started doing was merging all of their platforms and requiring that you
have a single Google account for all of them.
This probably doesn’t seem like a big deal today, but back in the day, people got pretty
heated about this.
And likely the biggest culprit was Google+.
If you’re not familiar with Google+, I don’t blame you because it ended up being a massive
failure.
Google+ was basically Google’s attempt at growing their own social media platform and
competing against Facebook.
It seems harmless at first glance, but the problem was that instead of enticing people
to join Google+ because of its features, Google forced Google+ down people’s throats.
For example, in 2011, Google modified the Gmail account creation process such that you
had to create a Google+ profile, and this was the case up until 2014.
I think you can see why this would be annoying, but this wasn’t even close to being their
worst infraction.
Likely their worst infraction was their policy regarding YouTube comments.
In 2013, YouTube mandated that people must have Google+ accounts if they wanted to leave
comments.
For obvious reasons, people were enraged and even YouTube’s cofounder Jawed Karim would
call out google.
Jawed would post quote “Why the f do I need a Google+ account to comment on a video?”
Despite all the backlash, Google wouldn’t untie YouTube and Google+ up until 2015.
While Google+ was no doubt the worst offender, the same fundamental argument was applicable
to Gmail accounts as well.
Google made it so that you needed a Gmail account if you wanted to do anything else
on Google.
Do you want to use Google Drive?
Well, you’re gonna need a Gmail.
Do you want to a YouTube account?
Well, you’re gonna need a Gmail.
Do you want to download apps from the play store?
Well, you’re gonna need a Gmail.
The funniest part was that this monopoly extended outside of Google’s services as well.
I’m sure you’re all familiar with the “login with Google” feature.
While this feature is on doubt super convenient, it just further strengthened the Google monopoly
and forced more people to get Gmails even if their use case had nothing to do with using
Gmail for email.
A similar case could be made for the education side of Gmail as well.
If universities wanted to run Google Ads or roll out schoolwide Google calendars, they
needed a Google account, and they needed all their students to have Google accounts as
well.
Now, technically, many Google features are available without having an account, but we
all know that the services are way better if you have an account.
Trying to use Google’s services without an account is like trying to use airpods with
a Windows computer.
It works, but it’s not all that great.
THE TURNING TIDE: All of this brings us to where we are today.
Google has become one of the most dominant email clients in the world by leveraging features,
scarcity, and forced adoption, but their dominance is slowly started to fade away.
So, what’s happening?
Well the answer is pretty simple.
Google is running out of trump cards.
Let’s start with features.
One of Gmail’s original selling features was their massive storage, but the competition
has not only caught up, they’ve actually overtaken Google.
Take Outlook for example.
Outlook offers 15 GB of storage just for their email alone, and you get an additional 5 GB
through OneDrive.
So, Gmail is by no means leagues ahead of the competition anymore.
Moving onto Gmail’s second selling factor of scarcity, well no one really thinks that
having Google account is cool anymore.
It’s basically just the norm and everyone already has one.
This also makes it extremely difficult for Google to force more adoption because there’s
really no one left to convince.
Something else that we should mention is that Google was never really the ideal choice for
students or professionals because you can’t leverage Microsoft office as much.
The reason that many schools and universities embraced Google docs, slides, and sheets is
because they made collaboration extremely convenient.
But, if you put the convenience and collaboration aspects aside, there’s no question that
Microsoft office is the superior service.
And over the past 10 years, Microsoft has very much made strides with their own online
office products and collaboration features.
Microsoft Office online is actually free, but that doesn’t even matter to institutions
because they usually already have a bunch of office 365 subscriptions anyway.
So, many institutions are switching back to Outlook to create synergies between email,
cloud storage, and Microsoft Office.
We should also mention that while schools and universities very much embraced Google,
companies never did.
In fact, nearly 196,000 companies in the US use outlook while only 4,400 use Gmail.
Another catalyst that has stolen market share away from Gmail is Apple’s recent Mail Privacy
Protection program.
This program makes it harder for email marketers to track down your IP address and your mail
activity.
And in age where everyone is worried about juggernauts like Google and Facebook collecting
your data, it’s not surprising that people are taking every chance to project themselves.
This is made even easier by the fact that you don’t have to do anything to take advantage
of this program.
In fact, it would be easier to take advantage of this program than not take advantage of
it.
All you have to do is use the inbuilt mail app on iPhones instead of downloading the
Gmail app.
And while people have been weary of the iPhone email app for years, it seems like this new
feature is very much pushing people towards it, and we can see this in the market share
data.
In September of 2021, Apple had 50% market share, but today they have nearly 60% market
share.
And I suspect that this will only grow with time as people become more aware of the importance
of data protection.
THE FUTURE OF GMAIL: At the end of the day, Gmail is by no means
dying or becoming irrelevant.
You very much still need a Gmail account to surf the internet freely.
But it does seem like people are using other services for email more and more frequently.
Some of the surface levels reasons for this are that competing email clients have caught
up in terms of features, they have better integration with Microsoft Office, and Google
has basically just reached market saturation.
But, if we look beyond that, it appears that we’re seeing a larger trend towards privacy.
People are more aware than ever how these companies are able to offer their services
for free and how they really make money.
For example, here’s all the data the Google is able to collect just off of Gmail.
It appears that Apple has caught onto this consumer awareness and they’re very much
framing their business with this mind.
They’re positioning themselves as the big tech company that doesn’t collect data.
This can be seen with their “Ask Not To Track” feature and their mail privacy protection
program.
It’s not just Apple who’s jumping onto this trend either.
In the messaging space, we have Signal and in the social media space, we have BeReal.
While these services offer completely different functionality, their core appeal is the identical:
Erasing the bad aspects of big tech.
And given that Google already doesn’t have the much room to grow, I suspect that Gmail’s
popularity will simply continue to trend downwards, but that’s just what I think.
Which email client is your favorite?
Comment that down below.
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