More Year-End ComScore Numbers
TechCrunch has an overload of charts showing the end-of-the-year numbers for Yahoo and Ask.com.
For Ask, Ask.com’s unique visitors increased for the year by 54%, from 29.8 million in November 2006 to 46 million last month. Ask may still be having market share troubles, but more users means a healthier company that isn’t going away anytime soon.
Ask’s other properties mostly enjoyed decent growth, with search results pages going up from about 20 million to about 30 million, Image Search up 91%, Spain and German up 2063% and 844%, respectively, AskCity up 548%, and the only down properties are Maps (really replaced by AskCity) and Weather (replaced by the same functionality in Ask’s 3D search results). Ask’s new search results are pushing traffic to its search verticals, growing them in a disproportinate way that Google wishes it had.
For Yahoo, TechCrunch had to run two seperate charts, showing the top growing properties and top declining ones, since there are so many. Yahoo’s U.S. properties are mostly on neither list, with small percentage raises (and a few small drops) leaving them stagnant. Yahoo Answers is one major exception, more than doubling its traffic. Yahoo’s biggest success was in Taiwan and Hong Kong, where search was up 7,452% and 6,763%, respectively.
Finally, TechCrunch ran this chart, showing the stagnation of Yahoo Mail and the rise of Gmail:
As you can see, Yahoo Mail went slightly up and down, and finished 3.21% up for the year. On that same page, projections show Gmail topping Yahoo Mail at current growth rates by November 2010. However, that projection assumes you are an idiot, because it also shows Yahoo Mail with the same amount of growth.
Yes, growth is common, but Gmail can’t take over the market completely without Yahoo losing users. Plus, growth never continues forever, especially at rates like this. More likely, Gmail will take some users from Yahoo and Microsoft, both of its competitors will grow slightly, and this war will still be going on well past 2010.
