Trends One email domain is stealing share from (almost) everyone else.

In October 2013 we published a breakdown of which email domains were most popular or common among resort guests. Truth be told, the parity between some of the names at the top surprised us. But now, two years later, we’ve run the numbers again to see what’s changed and one clear winner has emerged. Take a look.

The Goods
To find our answer we used the exact same set of mountain resorts as the last analysis. Initially this included 3,000,000 email addresses but that number has now grown to over 3,750,000. We also made the “other” group a bit more inclusive and focused our analysis on just the top five email domains. Let’s start with the pie chart:

To illustrate the changes in share for each domain, here’s a bar chart representing the change (in percentage points) for each one:

Collectively, the long-tail of domains dropped almost 4 percentage points while Hotmail, AOL, and Comcast also fell 0.3, 1.0, and 0.5 percentage points respectively. Yahoo increased by 0.4 points while Gmail was the clear winner with their share increasing by 5.3 percentage points since October 2013.

What This Means
If the letters DKIM come to mind as you ponder the findings above, they should. When we analyzed the impact of implementing DKIM back in 2013, we found that the biggest impact on deliverability, by far, was on Gmail.

So not only does Gmail now lead the second place domain by 4 percentage points (and growing), but the data also indicate this new leader is serious about spam. As marketers, that’s an important thing to keep in mind.