According to Hitwise (an Experian company), Microsoft has a dominant market share with its Hotmail web mail service in the UK, while Gmail has been flat for the last few months in spite of gaining some traction. Last week the combined market share of the Microsoft and Yahoo services was 13 times that of Google. The market share of Google, Yahoo and Microsoft web mail services were 0.34%, 1.23% and 3.22% respectively.
As far as news services is concerned, Google’s market share in news services is “extremely flat”, while Yahoo and Microsoft both have more peaks and troughs in their market share over the past 6 months. Although Yahoo is leading in news services, but the combined Yahoo (0.13%) and Microsoft (0.070%) market share was only twice that of Google (0.099%).
Yahoo and Microsoft jointly have 4 of the top 10 Business related and Finance related web sites, and together would account for almost one in five visits to the category. Google Maps enjoys almost half of all internet visits to Maps websites in the UK.
All three websites get UK traffic to both their UK and USA websites but the split between these websites varies depending on the subject. Google,Yahoo and Microsoft also have less market share of their content sites in the UK than in the USA, other than Google’s Picasa which is ranked sixth Yahoo’s Flickr ranked second.
If the combined Yahoo! and Microsoft content business ‘Yahoosoft’ deal goes ahead, it won’t just impact Google, but also other companies in niche sectors.