Hitwise: Visits To Gmail Surpass YouTube

Hitwise reported that “for the past two weeks, the market share of US Internet visits to Gmail has been higher than visits to YouTube.” Accordingly, the measurement firm says that Gmail is now second only to Google.com in terms of visits among Google’s properties.

Gmail has recently had a number of problems, with several outages and problems of varying degrees of severity. I wonder if there’s a relationship between the growth of Gmail and these problems. As they say correlation doesn’t equal causation, but it would make sense.

I took a look at Compete and Google trends comparing traffic to Gmail vs. YouTube and those sources, less reliable perhaps, show something quite different (with YouTube the clear winner):

Undoubtedly these tools aren’t picking up many of the referrals to Gmail from within Google but it’s strange that these numbers are so far apart.