Oct 17 2008
Relax Everyone, Facebook Is Not Killing Email
At the beginning of 2008, I had a number of people ask me the same anxiety-riddled question: are Facebook and MySpace going to kill email?
My response then is the same as it is now: email is fine, the kids are alright, and we can all play in the same sandbox together.
My impression at the time was that many industry veterans seemed genuinely freaked out by the fact that their own kids were now using these new and different forms of communication a lot more than email. And truth be told, the meteoric rise of social networks, particularly among young people, was (and remains) worth noting, learning about, and venturing into for some businesses. But social networks’ relationship with email is less about “this or that” as it is about “this and that” — the two channels are not competing with one another so much as coexisting peacefully within one online ecosystem.
One easy way to understand this coexistence is to take a look at clickstream data from this past week (ending 10/4/08), provided by our friends at Hitwise:
The above data shows that nearly 15% of all social networking site traffic is currently coming directly from email accounts like Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live/Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL Mail (These are 4 of the top 13 sites visited immediately before social networks).
In short, these social networks rely heavily on email alerts to remind their customers to visit their sites. The simple truth is that many people check their email more often than their Facebook page, so email plays a key role in Facebook’s long-term success. It’s no secret that you can’t register a Facebook or MySpace account without also having an email account.
Equally interesting, the gap in online market share between email and social networking has narrowed dramatically in recent months. The following Hitwise data shows how the traffic gap between web-based email services and social networks is the lowest since August of 2007:
In case you’re still not convinced, Robin Goad, Research Director at Hitwise UK, provides further evidence that social networking’s popularity is coming back down to earth, pointing out that Facebook’s growth in the UK is also slowing down.
I guess this all means that social networks aren’t the Big Bad Wolf after all.
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