It's often interesting to learn about a product or service's users - particularly when you are one. Maybe you'll find that your stylish small car is popular with old ladies, for example. Or that your taste in TV shows mirrors that of eight-year-old boys. Anyway, Rapleaf recently took a look at this concept as it applies to email.
Rapleaf sampled 120,000 people who deal with a major email provider (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or AOL Mail). It turns out that, in terms of popularity, Hotmail and Yahoo Mail may be ahead with minors. Gmail does quite well with young adults.
Then, in the next two age brackets, Hotmail regains the lead, and AOL and Yahoo establish a near-tie. Finally, as you might have suspected, AOL does indeed rule where older people are concerned.
Rapleaf found fewer differences when it sliced the data according to gender; there's a pretty even split between male and female AOL and Yahoo users. Still, it discovered that noticeably more women use Gmail, and men definitely have a fondness for Hotmail.
Rapleaf's supposed to release more data about the social network memberships and friend counts of these email users in the future. In the meantime, a hat tip goes to Sarah Perez.
The way the chart is presented makes one think that each email service is being compared within the age brackets. The data of the chart however tells me that each email is simply divided into the user age and these bars are grouped by age, not provider. This means that these comparisons are only valid if they had the exact same sample from each provider.
I would personally rather see a chart that told me the brakedown of 19-25 users.
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Significance
Looking at the bar chart, at first glance the variation between providers looks like it would be inside the margin of error. In other words no significant difference. Where are the stats?