Google’s free email service Gmail is growing in popularity and may soon overtake Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail by the end of the year. Between December 2007 and December 2008, Gmail’s unique monthly visitors in the United States grew 43% from 20.8 million to 29.6 million, according to ComScore. Hotmail lost 5% of unique monthly visitors during the same period, falling from 45.7 million to 43.5 million.
The popularity is being attributed to Gmail’s fondness for free features, including several gigabytes of free storage, chat and video messaging services, and access to applications such as Google Docs in their email services.
Of course, Gmail still has some way to go before it catches up with market leader Yahoo, which has 91 million uniques. But if the current growth rates continue, Gmail could be top of the pops by 2011.
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