Social Insight Into Email Users, Part 1: Age and Gender

We thought it would be interesting to see what you can learn about a person from their email, so we decided to compare demographics and online behavior of people who use the four most popular internet email clients: AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo mail.

For this study, we sampled 120,000 users with @aol.com, @gmail.com, @hotmail.com, and @yahoo.com emails, and looked at their age, gender, online activity, friend counts, and social network memberships.

We broke this study into several parts so this post will only cover the age and gender data.

Overall, people who use these four webmail clients tend to be young, with over 75% of all users under 35 years of age. Part of the reason for this younger skew is that these demographics are based on self-reported data from public social media profiles, and the people who use social media are generally younger. Even so, comparing demographics between each of the email services offers insight into userbase differences.

Here’s what we found:

Ages of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• 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

Gender of AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Email Users

Highlights

• Hotmail has the greatest gender skew with over 57% of users being male
• Gmail tends to have more female than male users (53% vs 47%)
• AOL and Yahoo are gender balanced

Concluding Remarks

Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo users tend to be younger while AOL users are slightly older. Hotmail’s audience tends to made up of more males, Gmail users tend to lean female, and AOL and Yahoo users are equally likely to be male and female.

Next time, we’ll study friend counts and how active these email users are online.