Interesting HitWise data points about Google

If you read the press, listen to the friends in the tech industry, you would have an impression that Google is taking over the web in every area. However, the data below from Hitwise shows a different picture.

Look at Gmail. It is an excellent product that has received raving reviews almost everywhere. But it has only 2% of market share in Email services. Yahoo Mail and Hotmail have 42% and 22% respectively.

The same with online maps. Mapquest and Yahoo Map have 56% and 20% market share whereas Google map and Google Earth have 7.5% and 2%.

Outside the echo chamber of the techies, people may not appreciate things like AJAX as much as we do. I tried to get my wife to move from Y!Mail to Gmail but she just would not do it (even I opened a Gmail account for her).

What Google is clearly doing well is search. It has close to half of the market and is good at making money out of eyeballs with their PPC ads.

Profitable podcasting

There are a lot of people doing podcasting but the question is how to make money from it. The story below may give you some clues.

Chinesepod.com was a Chinese language podcasting service started by Ken Carroll, a Dublin native who has been running English schools in Shanghai. When he was introduced to podcasting, he immediately realized its potential to scale his business to global audience and started podcasting with Chinese lessons. A year later, Chinesepod.com is now one of the most widely downloaded podcasts on Yahoo Podcasts with more than 5 million downloads.

The interesting part is that the podcasting is free but the transcripts of podcasts is available for $9 a month. It also sells flashcards and exercises as a premium service. Most subscribers are currently from US. The Internet operation also scales much better than his brick-and-mortar schools and is already profitable.

So, if you are providing an education service, podcasting may be the way to scale your business.