Gmail Surpasses Youtube As Google's Second Most Visited Property

Web Analytics form Hitwise reports that US visitors to Gmail has ranked higher than Youtube for the first time ever, pushing the online video service to the 11th place of Hitwise's most popular website list.

Gmail, which has been hit by two major outages in the past month, is now Google's second most popular online property, followed by Youtube and Google Image Search (ranked 11th and 12th respectively).

According to figures released by Hitwise, Gmail's market share of visits has been increasing by 70 percent year on year, almost tripling over the last two years. Youtube saw its share rise by 16 percent year on year but, according to Hitwise data, slumped to levels last recorded last May.

Google dominates the chart, which is made up of nearly 520,000 websites, with 6.41 percent of the overall visitors, followed in second and third place by Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo!

Interestingly, Yahoo! Mail ranks as the third top source of Traffic to Gmail behind Facebook and Google, apparently because users have multiple web-based email accounts.

Other online analytics services like Google Trends and Compete did not highlight Gmail's surge, presumably because they are less reliable.

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