Poor People Use Yahoo, Those Better Off Use Google | Hacker News Reader

Poor People Use Yahoo, Those Better Off Use Google

techcrunch.com

14 pointsdavidw8 comments

  Struggling Societies, Urban Essence, Blue Collar Blackbone,
  Varying Lifestyles, Aspiring Contemporaries, Remote America,
  Rural Villages and Farms, Metro Fringe, American Diversity,
  Upscale America, Small-town Contentment, Affluent Suburbia

OMG? New low in PC? It's like J.Crew colors to explain geographic groups. My curiosity got the best of me and I found this explanation: http://www.tactician.com/support/mosaic_documents.asp

Marketing clusters like those are nothing new..

I remember an article from last year or so that said Google Mail users were far fewer in number than Yahoo! or Hotmail users but were wealthier. This makes sense as GMail was still relatively new two years ago, and more tech savvy (and higher income) users switched to GMail first.

Also, people who rely on Yahoo! Mail end up using those services as a lot of Yahoo! sites require logins, such as Yahoo! Games. Without Yahoo! or MSN Mail, people would eventually stop visiting those portals, as most users trust Google for search results. So that explains why users even visit those portals any more.

As far as Google, one isn't required to have a login, except for things like business/calendar tools, document management, and adsense, as far as I remember. One can clearly notice Google targets wealthier and smarter users. (I'm not saying wealth equals brains--Google simply targets nerds, education, and corporate users while Yahoo is still trying to target everybody at once.)

I don't think "more tech savvy" is part of the mechanism. GMail was originally invite-only, and Googlers tend to be fairly well-off, and so their friends tend to be fairly well-off.

As for "Google targets wealthier and smarter users", I don't think it's intentional. If you go to any tech talks given by their usability folks, they say they intentionally don't do user personas, precisely because they want to target "everybody". I find it far more likely that they design things that work slightly better for them, and their friends who help them test, who, again, tend to be of similar socioeconomic background.

I actually just assumed the title was talking about mail services, in which case I can see some truth, though it is probably a corollary to the actual facts.

I think people who are more technologically-inclined are using Gmail. It offers a lot of obvious advantages to a power email user over Yahoo! Mail. I have also noticed that those who are technologically inclined are often slightly more affluent than those who are not, perhaps due to in-demand skillsets causing jumps in pay rates versus other jobs. So maybe the money is sort of a side effect of technological knowledge.

Just my .02.

Wow, I thought of the same thing...

I would think it would be the other way around. people with no money have slower connections and can't wait the 30 minutes for yahoo's portal to open where as you can load Google pretty fast even on a 56K ( they still make those? ) connection. I call BS on this article.

I disagree that money has anything to do with the service people use.

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