Online calendars still drop in the bucket

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Online calendars still drop in the bucket

Posted by Mathew @ 11:55 am on January 4 2007 | |

LeAnn Prescott from Hitwise has an analysis of online calendars that has been getting a fair bit of traffic and commentary, since it shows that Google’s calendar — which has only been around for about six months — is growing strongly in “market share of Internet visits” (as Hitwise describes their proprietary measurement of traffic).

LeAnn says that Google’s traffic share has tripled since June, and that it appears to be close to matching Yahoo’s traffic, which has been declining sharply over the same period. All of which is great, and it’s nice to see that a Google property is growing — unlike, say, Froogle or Google Co-op, etc. But that’s not what struck me about the Hitwise chart. What struck me was how tiny the online calendar market is.

If you look away from the downhill slide of Yahoo’s line on the chart and the upward climb of Google’s line on the chart, what you notice is that even at its peak the market leader — Yahoo — had 0.008 per cent of all Internet traffic. After its slide, it is around 0.005 per cent, and Google is at 0.0043 per cent. In other words, all three of the online calendar leaders put together have a little over one one-hundredth of one per cent of Internet traffic.

As more than one commenter has noted, it would be interesting to see where 30boxes.com and some of the other online Ajax calendars sit in terms of traffic share. But what is clear is that Google and Yahoo are still fighting over table scraps, and that online calendars have a long way to go before they become a significant factor for Internet users.

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Mathew posted this article under Google, Web2.0, Yahoo on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 11:55 am. . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, and you can also view Technorati Linkbacks or check for other responses using YackTrack.

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Andrew 1 year ago 1 point
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Calendar + Email = Outlook Until any of these online calendars can synch my email/contacts and calendar with my handheld (Blackberry/Treo) then they will be relegated to a niche product used to schedule meetings at trade shows with disparate teams, or pubic event notices.

I have zero interest in keeping more than one calendar, and right now it is Outlook as it is the only one that synch's with my Blackberry effectively and easily.

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Andrew 1 year ago 1 point
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typo, public not pubic.. :)

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Mathew Ingram 1 year ago 1 point
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Thanks for the comment, Andrew -- I would agree that the synching email/contacts and appointments and doing so with mobile devices are a couple of big holes that online calendars have yet to fill.

And I also agree that if they were just used for scheduling pubic events, that would definitely be a niche market :-)

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