Gmail Users are Young, Female; AOL Users are Older
Social media data company Rapleaf has just completed a comprehensive study involving the demographics and behavior of webmail users. In the first part of their study, they looked specifically at age and gender data and revealed some interesting findings. For example, did you know that Gmail has more female users than male? And that Hotmail is the other way around? Meanwhile, AOL users are older...but maybe not as old as you think.
For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age and gender after having collected the data from social media profiles where people have publicly disclosed this information. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their blog post. Users of social media sites already tend to be younger, so it's not surprising that they found that the majority of the webmail users studied were young with 75% under the age of 35.
Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.
Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older
That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:
- Nearly 50% of Gmail users are under 25 years of age
- AOL users tend to be older, with 31% of users being at least 36 years old
- Yahoo and Hotmail email users have similar age distributions
It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.
As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.
Gmail Has More Females, Hotmail Has More Males
Perhaps more interesting is the gender variations between the services. Gmail, for instance, includes more females (53%) than males (47%). If those were election poll results, we would call it "too close to call," but in terms of tens of thousands of users, these percentage point differences have meaning.
Why would Gmail attract more females? And conversely, why does Hotmail have more males? (It's 57% male.) Is there something about the aesthetics, workflow or features in those services that appeal more to women than men or vice versa? And if so, what? Unfortunately, raw data can't provide these sorts of answers, but they're definitely intriguing to us. We would imagine they are intriguing to the user interface designers and engineers behind the products, too.
Do women like Gmail's drag-and-drop features or its themes? Do men prefer Hotmail's efficient "quick adds" which allow for one-click additions of Bing content to messages? We doubt those are the reasons for the discrepancy, but it makes us wonder what are. Try as we might, we can't come up with an easy theory to explain this. (If you can, please share in the comments.)
Future details about the study will focus on other data including online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships. Stay tuned to Rapleaf's site for more information.
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Sounds like the case of I grew up watching black and white movies so I still like to. Twenty years AOL users will no longer use a computer (fingers to shaky), those young females will still be using Gmail but be categorized as old, and the next gen may not even be using email.
Info seems kind of who cares to me. It's a logic kind of dictates rule. Years ago, AOL was the thing, and most people were using AOL. Many of those people still do, and are obviously more than 20 years old. AOL email users will only get older, and smaller in count until their are gone gone gone. Young people don't buy black and white TV's, they buy color.
I guess Hotmail's larger male user base is simply because the service has been around since 1996, at which time it's fair to say there was a larger male population on the internet.
I don't think the Gmail/Hotmail female/male split really says anything about choices people are making today about their preferred email client.
I beg to differ, last time I checked such was not the case.
Posted by: lelapin
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October 22, 2009 10:25 AM
@BWI: I don't know any old people who buy black and white TVs.
It's hard to speculate about these gender discrepancies without appearing sexist. But I'll do it anyway.
It's possible that the male Hotmail leaning is because men (generally speaking) are more interested in technology than women -- which isn't to say that they have a greater aptitude for it, only that they tend (tend) to have a greater interest in it. And since Hotmail was one of the first web-based email services, it makes sense that most of its earlier adopters (i.e., before Yahoo! and Gmail) were men.
The female "preference" for Gmail, then, can be seen as just a side-effect of this. Or (to continue stereotyping) because Gmail has a more attractive interface and incorporated a chat client early on. (Speaking from experience, most of the girls I know love Gchat.)
I apologize in advance to everybody for this post.
Posted by: kilobitspersecond.com
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October 22, 2009 11:16 AM
Nothing surprise me these days; however, I have three friends on Yahoo... two female, one male; I have one friend on Hotmail, male; and many friends on Gmail, six male. two female. Why more Gmails... because I set up the accounts for my friends and Gmail is my webmail preference.
We girls know how to do email forwarding.
Ever since 1997, I have switched email address multiple times.
I think that Google as a whole is a more "hip" company. For this reason, maybe girls are signing up with them, to have a hip email address. Also, they offer gchat, and it has been my experience that more girls chat online than guys. These are just my theories though.
As noted, this seems like pretty flawed methodology to only look at publically exposed social media profiles (guessing MySpace profiles were the best source for them?). Seems like EVERYONE skewed younger as almost 70% of the "older" AOL users supposedly are under 36 and nearly 50% are under 26.
Looking at the Quantcast data, you see almost the reverse picture in a couple cases, where Yahoo skews older and AOL skews younger (due to all the teen AIM users checking email) and Gmail has a lot of 20 somethings (which is consistent with this study due to high propensity for this group to also have social media profiles). This data also shows Hotmail with more females than Gmail:
http://www.quantcast.com/mail.aol.com#demographics
http://www.quantcast.com/mail.yahoo.com#demographics
http://www.quantcast.com/gmail.com#demographics
http://www.quantcast.com/hotmail.com#demographics
i suspect that one of the reasons gmail is primarily used by females (and hotmail by males) is that 'hotmail' (the name) sounds somewhat 'suggestive' (provacative, if you will). as a female gmail account user, i was not prepared to attach my name to 'hotmail', feeling it was somehow unprofessional or suggestive of a 'fast' lifestyle (if u get my drift). as is applicable in all marketing, it's in the name (the label) and gmail translates in a more neutral manner. (simply one woman's opinion... mine)
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@Brad: Those quantcast stats are very interesting, but I think the GMail one should be this since gmail only points to the login page:
http://www.quantcast.com/mail.google.com#demographics
But now very glad I know how to access quantcast demographics:)
any female here to like friendship with me..
Well, I don't agree on this. I'm not female and I'm almost 40 years old. The strange thing is that most of my friends use Gmail and they're also males at my age... :)
Yeah yeah...I know...
İ think so AOL for older
I beg to differ, last time I checked such was not the case.
was not prepared to attach my name to 'hotmail', feeling it was somehow unprofessional or suggestive of a 'fast' lifestyle (if u get my drift).
thanks so much 4 a nice topic. it's really a wonderful