Germany's favorite email service 2019
The Publicare email study evaluated 13 million email subscriptions last year. It shows that the trend away from German providers is continuing. There is still little movement in the ranking of providers, but the underlying trends are showing a slow but steady revolution.
It is said in IT that never change a running system. In the age of digitization and constant change, this is becoming increasingly rare — users only stick to one thing for a long time, sometimes for life: the good old e-mail address.
Please also read the latest analysis results: Germany's favorite email service 2024
As the Publicare email studies of recent years have already found, Germans remain loyal to their providers. 88.6% of the approximately 13 million active email addresses examined are among the top 10 providers. And their ranking — grouped by company — is largely unchanged compared to 2016: The United Internet Group with its brands GMX and Web.de remains clearly at the top, followed by Google as in the previous year. And the other places are also followed in 2016 by Deutsche Telekom (with T-Online), Microsoft (Hotmail, Outlook, live, msn), Yahoo and Freenet.
However, it's worth a second look. If you take a closer look at the trends and shifts, you can see almost dramatic changes.
Provider market shares: It's bubbling beneath the surface
The market dynamics of recent years can basically be summed up in one word: Gmail. Google's email service has seen extreme growth since 2014. The decisive factor is probably that Google is accelerating the use of its mail service on mobile devices with Android operating systems and making it necessary for app downloads from the Google Play Store, for example. Apparently, these addresses are then also used for e-mail traffic.
We had already identified Gmail as the winner in 2014 — back then, the service had just overtaken Yahoo and stood at around 8%. Two years later, Google was already in second place in the ranking with 12%. Based on our current measurement, Google is now at a whopping 21.4%, meaning it has almost doubled its market share from 2016 to 2018. And as mentioned at the beginning, this market is normally as immobile as an oil tanker. By way of comparison, the most dramatic shift in the top 10 away from Gmail is that Vodafone (arcor.de) and AOL have switched places 7 and 8. And both account for less than a tenth of Google's email addresses.
Trend away from German email providers
Losers are almost all other services. Although the United Internet Group is number one as in all previous years, the gap with Google is no longer categorical: In 2016, GMX and Web.de played in a league other than Gmail (together 41.7% versus 12.1%), today they don't even double (37.2% vs. 21.4%). Looking at GMX and Web.de individually, Gmail would even be at the top. What Google gains is lost by the rest: In addition to United Internet, all other top 10 services, with the exception of Apple, have a declining market share. With its iCloud and me.com services, the US company now has a market share of 1.0%. That sounds like little, but it is almost a doubling of the share compared to 2016 (0.6%) — and this is contrary to the market trend.
The success of US companies means the opposite: The noticeable trend towards moving away from German mail providers as early as 2016 is becoming perpetuated. Compared to the figures from the Publicare email study for 2016, their share of the top 10 has fallen even further: from 55.9% to 47.3%. In 2014, the figure was still around 61%. So over half of Germans still use a “German” email account — but the forecast looks poor, and there is data for that too.
The slow revolution
The distortions in the industry become even more obvious when you just look at the addresses of new email subscriptions. These are not necessarily new registered addresses, but we think these addresses are younger overall and the proportion of new emails is higher — so these figures are an important trend barometer for future development. For example, this data shows that the share of Vodafone (arcor.de) addresses has not only declined significantly in inventory (from 2.6% to 1.4%), but that this trend will continue: Vodafone's share of new registrations is only 0.7%. Reason: Since 2018, there has been no more Arcor, even though the addresses can still be managed via “My Vodafone”.
And what is the trend with Google/Gmail now? Extremely clear: Of all new subscribers who joined in October 2018, 36.5% had a Gmail address. This puts Google in first place, ahead of United Internet with just 28.1%. Even if you add the other German provider T-Online (5.6%), Google is ahead. Deutsche Telekom is itself one of the big losers when it comes to new registrations and is sliding behind Microsoft, which, just like Apple, has an increasing share. Apparently, five years after Edward Snowden's NSA revelations, the “email from Germany” argument is not working (anymore).
It is also interesting that the number of “other” email services, especially among new registrations, is much higher at 12.2% than in previous years — possibly an indication that the market is further fragmenting. At the same time, the already low shares of Vodafone, AOL and Freenet are falling by around half in the number of new registrations.
Providers must position themselves against Gmail
The unwavering trend towards Gmail, which we've been observing for around five years now, is only accelerating. The services of major US providers Apple and Microsoft are most likely to counter this, albeit at a comparatively low level, as well as a growing number of own domains, “throwaway addresses” and niche providers, as the growth among “others” shows.
The German providers, which still dominate overall today, are therefore apparently living off their substance. In a market as sluggish as that of email addresses, this could go well for many years — but the direction is clear: The largely ad-free and free Gmail is digging the water off GMX, Web.de, T-Online and smaller colleagues such as Yahoo, Freenet, AOL and Vodafone/Arcor.
To counteract this, providers must offer new customers clear added value — for example, a better user experience through interactive emails based on CSS. These are technically available, but have not yet been offered to customers. Not even from Google.
methodology
For this analysis, Publicare evaluated 13 million anonymized e-mail addresses from the e-commerce sector. All email addresses come from contact lists for German B2C campaigns from 2018, which were made available to us anonymously for evaluation purposes. When selecting email addresses, we made sure that they represent as representative a cross-section of various B2C product offerings and target groups as possible. The figures were analysed using the same method as in 2016. Comparative figures for trend analyses come from Publicare email study 2016 & Publicare email study 2014.
