Facebook has experienced rapid growth in visitors, increasing from 0.3% of the Australian population aged 14+ in December 2006 to 38% in the 12 months to June 2010. It is still growing, 44% in September 2010, an estimated 6.8 million Australians, visited Facebook.

If Project Titan parallels this growth, who else might be affected?

When looking at email websites visited in an average 4 week period, almost a third of the Australian population aged 14+ have visited Hotmail/Windows Live (31%, an estimated 5.6 million), 17% (an estimated 3.1 million) Bigpond Email, 12% (an estimated 2.2 million) Gmail and 11% (an estimated 1.9 million) Yahoo!7Mail.

Among Facebook visitors over half have used Hotmail/Windows Live (54%, an estimated 3.7 million), followed by Gmail (20%, an estimated 1.4 million), Yahoo!7Mail (17%, an estimated 1.2 million) and Bigpond Email (16%, an estimated 1.1 million).


Email and Facebook Visitors


Source: Roy Morgan Research, July 2009 – June 2010, n= 18, 966. *People who have visited Facebook in the last 4 weeks. Please note that respondents were able to choose more than one email site.


Andrew Braun, Industry Director Mobile, Internet and Technology, Roy Morgan Research, says:

“At the launch of Project Titan, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, indicated the new offering was ‘not an e-mail killer’. Given its proposed seamless integration of messaging types, there will be a few concerns at the largest email providers, such as Microsoft where over 50% of Facebook users have a Hotmail email account.

“If 50% of Facebook users moved to Facebook for their email this would create a big hole for the other email providers.

“However, if we recall the ill-fate of Google Wave, which was at the time touted as the next ‘email killer,’ this new system may simply be a nice addition to Facebook’s artillery and not the death of email.

“It will be interesting to see how the take-up of Facebook’s new messaging platform impacts the use of email and these email sites.”

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