WebProNews

Social sites may be surpassing email in usage, but some fairly surprising data from Hitwise shows that visits to Gmail have surpassed visits to YouTube. The news comes at a time when Gmail can use some good news as complaints about downtime have recently mounted.

"Both websites are receiving more visits than one year ago, with a bigger increase in the growth of visits to Gmail," reports Heather Dougherty of Hitwise. "The market share of visits to Gmail has increased 70% for the week ending March 7, 2009 as compared to the same week last year. Visits to YouTube also increased 16% during the same time frame."

Gmail is now number 10 in the rankings of most popular sites in all categories. Yahoo Mail is number 2. Gmail is number 2 among Google properties.

It looks like Gmail's frequent new feature launches are paying off, and Yahoo Mail better be looking over its shoulder because the top three traffic sources of Gmail's are Google, Facebook, and Yahoo Mail. I wonder if Yahoo's getting worried yet.