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**thedamndest** · 01-25-2010, 01:03 PM

For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age and gender after having collected the data from social media profiles where people have publicly disclosed this information. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their blog post. Users of social media sites already tend to be younger, so it's not surprising that they found that the majority of the webmail users studied were young with 75% under the age of 35.
Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample.
Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older

That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age:
Nearly 50% of Gmail users are under 25 years of age

AOL users tend to be older, with 31% of users being at least 36 years old

Yahoo and Hotmail email users have similar age distributions

It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc.
As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._are_older.php

Not purely scientific as the samples were self-reported instead of random.

01-25-2010, 01:03 PM	#349
thedamndest A Property of Matter Posts: 25,543	AOL users are old For the Rapleaf study, the company sampled 120,000 webmail accounts from users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, and @yahoo.com email addresses. They then looked into the users' age and gender after having collected the data from social media profiles where people have publicly disclosed this information. Obviously, in doing so, they've skewed their findings a bit, as the company notes in their blog post. Users of social media sites already tend to be younger, so it's not surprising that they found that the majority of the webmail users studied were young with 75% under the age of 35. Rapleaf says that despite their collection methods, their findings can offer insight into these different userbases. To some extent, that may be true, but we're left wondering how different these findings would be if they hadn't relied on public social media data and rather went with a true random sample. Gmail Skews Young, AOL Older That being said, here's what Rapleaf came up with. In terms of age: Nearly 50% of Gmail users are under 25 years of age AOL users tend to be older, with 31% of users being at least 36 years old Yahoo and Hotmail email users have similar age distributions It's not all that surprising that Gmail users tend to be young. After all, the service was established years after AOL, Hotmail, and Yahoo. Some of those who already had webmail accounts on other services were hesitant to switch at first (and some still are) since the process of changing email accounts is never entirely painless and often leads to months of checking dual inboxes for emails that may have been missed. Instead, Google's growth likely came from more webmail first-timers looking to set up their brand-new online accounts in addition to the braver "email switchers," a group that also probably skews younger...especially since an effective switchover often requires a bit of technical savvy involving setting up forwarding, auto-responders, etc. As for AOL being comprised of older users, that too, is relatively unsurprising. Where Google is the newest service, AOL is one of the oldest. Its core user base has aged with it over the years and those who haven't jumped shipped yet are bound to be the older members who don't stay as current with changing technology trends. Still, setting the bar for "old" at 36 is a little humbling - especially for those of us getting up in our years. (That's not old, is it?) It would be interesting to see further breakdowns of this demographic into age segments including 40+, 50+, and so on, but that data was not available. http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives..._are_older.php Not purely scientific as the samples were self-reported instead of random.