Is email going the way of regular mail?
First some astonishing statistics: (Source: PingDom: Internet 2010 in numbers)
- 107 trillion – The number of emails sent on the Internet in 2010.
- 294 billion – Average number of email messages per day.
- 1.88 billion – The number of email users worldwide.
- 89.1% – The share of emails that were spam. (that is 269 billion emails)
- 2.9 billion – The number of email accounts worldwide
- 25% – Share of email accounts that are corporate
Is email dying? Perhaps not, but the next generation is certainly behaving differently. If you have kids (ages 12+) you have definitely noticed their lack of attention to email, and much more focus on texting and facebook postings…
e-mail usage was down 8% overall in 2010, which is pretty impressive to me although part of the drop may be attributable to how people check e-mail on smartphones without actually logging into their Web-based e-mail accounts. But that’s nothing compared to the 59% drop in the in the 12 to 17-year-old age bracket.
Source: ComScore’s 2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review via Is E-Mail Dead by Don Wilmott
This is not a surprise per say, but an evolution of communications perhaps is.
Other interesting bits of information that have recently come to surface follow:
- According to Facebook COO Shery Sandberg, only 11% of teens email daily, a statistic she sees as a sign of the coming transition to SMS and social networks.
- ComScore reports that while email usage has decreased in 12-17 year olds, it has increase by 28% and 22% in the age segments of 65+ and 55-64 respectively.
- According to the Pew Internet Report, email remains the number one online activity, with 94% of online people using email.
- Radicati Research reports that corporate end users send and receive an average of 110 email messages per day.
