Gmail is officially out of beta and it’s enjoying being all grown up, thank you very much. Maybe it just needed to have its training wheels taken off so it could really get moving but we all know that the beta label was just that; a label. Since its introduction over 6 years ago Gmail has been growing steadily and as TechCrunch reports it has moved past AOL’s email service to be the third largest email service in the US.

comScore has given this title to Gmail based on unique visitors to the service and it has just passed the AOL service with 37 million unique visitors in July while AOL had 36.4 million visitors. As if AOL doesn’t already have enough trouble with just being AOL this kind of news is not what they need to hear. It doesn’t appear as if this is going to be a close race either since the two services are headed in very different directions.

….so far this year, Gmail’s unique visitors grew 25 percent, while AOL’s declined 22 percent. Thus, the two crossed paths in July. (Hotmail grew only 8 percent during the same period, while Yahoo Mail increased unique visitors by a healthy 16 percent).

Source: Marketingpilgrim.com