GigaOM

One interesting thing that jumps out at me is that email and instant messaging accounts probably aren’t increasing as rapidly as they were - we’re hitting a saturation point where the majority of people do have those accounts already, and now the shift is towards filling in the gaps. On the opposite side, there’s still plenty of room for more wireless email users, since that is still a fairly uncommon activity for most people.

Finally, I’ve found what seems to be a reliable figure for the total number of potential consumers on the Internet.

Assuming, on valid basis, that 10 out of 10 people who use the Internet to make purchases have an email address, then we can conclude that the potential size of the Internet market is 1.4B users (same as number of active email accounts.) Of course that doesn’t count the fact that I have 2 email accounts as do most professionals (work email and personal email) So the figure could be closer to 1.2B

That means the total number of potential Internet consumers is the same as that of potential Coca Cola drinkers in Africa, which is 1.2B.

Hmmm… So you’re telling me that the origin of the Internet, too, can be traced back to Africa?

On second thought, the actual observation I wanted to make is that the Internet has a long way to catch up to Coca Cola in terms of poularity and accessibility.

Marc

As of April, NTT DoCoMo has 46.6m i-mode users, all of whom have ‘wireless email’. I wonder how Radicati came up with 14m for the whole world?

If MS Office remains the dominant office suite, there is no way that corporate e-mail bloat grows so slowly. The age of the 100 MB attachment being typical are not far away.

Thanks for the post. Interesting stats.

Two comments re: stats and truth.

Marc - 1.4b email accounts doesn’t necesarily mean 1.4b users. There is a lot of double counting here. I have a hotmail, yahoo, gmail account, plus a work email address with more than 5 aliases which I use regularly. Does that go down as 8 accounts, or just 1?

Benedict - just because 46m have wireless email, it doesn’t mean that 46m USE wireless email. May be more than 14m, but probably much less than 46m.

From Zapr’s point of view, I found the archiving stat very interesting. Gotta watch that one closely.

I always find email-accounts-counts strange. I have a couple of domains with catchall aliasses, so I use different things all-over the place. Most of it end up on 1 popbox, but is copied to my Gmail. I have some other popboxes for experiments. So how many accounts do I have? I can be reached at billions of different adresses (A quick test shows 72 characters before the @sign works, so that’s more than a 1 with 100 zero’s, in posibillities). Or is it just one account? Or are it 2?