03
2007
Google Calendar Up Threefold Since June
As you resolve to get your schedule more organized in the new year, do what more and more people are doing – use Google Calendar. A few weeks ago, Google Calendar overtook MSN Calendar in market share of US visits, and is quickly approaching Yahoo! Calendar. In the six months from June 2006 to December 2006, the market share of visits to Google Calendar increased by 333%, at the expense of its main competitors.
As I mentioned last May in my first post about Google Calendar, having a calendar service, along with email and all of the other services it has been launching makes Google seem more like a portal. However, Google Calendar is actually less a part of the Google fold than you might think. Yahoo and MSN calendars are primarily used by people who use their respective email services – Hitwise Clickstream reveals that for the week ending 12/30/06, 88% of the upstream traffic to MSN Calendar came directly from Hotmail, while Yahoo! Calendar received 48% of its upstream from Yahoo! Mail or Yahoo! Address Book, and the bulk of its remaining traffic from other Yahoo! sites. Google Calendar, on the other hand, received only 19% of its upstream traffic from Gmail for the week ending 12/30/06, and 42% from Google search. Yahoo! Mail was Google Calendar’s third largest source of traffic, with 2.7% of upstream visits, and Hotmail was sixth at 1.2% of visits. What this indicates to me is that people who are not necessarily heavy Gmail users are now using Google Calendar, including users of Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail. Its easy to use features and sharing capabilities have allowed it to steal share from its competition, and in this case, catch them in less than a year.
Google Calendar, with its great features is bound to get the #1 spot among online calendar services
Well, when you look at your analysis that the big jump in clicks in December for google calendar as you mentioned came from Google Search–44% versus from Gmail 19%, I think it is obvious that many people were searching for Calendars to purchase at the end of the year for the upcoming year 2007 and noticed the intriquing link for “www.google.com/calendars”.
In addition, as the overall internet continues to grow, with more destinations and places for US Internet Visits–such as youtube, myspace, etc. it is very likely that the use of Yahoo and MSN calendar product may actually be increasing on a number of users basis, however, as a % of overall US Internet Visits it is decreasing because there are 100′s of million ADDITIONAL hits flooding the web on these other expanding websites (e.g., myspace). I realize this is not the point of your article but it probably should be mentioned.
The best way to truly track these products is by the number of users, especially if my assumption about the search hits holds weight (which it might not). Regardless it truly is peculiar to see that less hits are coming from the mail service verses other sources considering my experience with the calendar service of my choice is pretty much integrated with my use of email and address book.
Google provide the great service. Unfortunately most users still don’t know the functionality behind the Google Calendar.