I just arrived back from ISPCon in Chicago. Bryan and I headed up there to meet with some of our competitors. We had lunch with the CEO of Bluetie yesterday, which is one of FuseMail’s main competitors. It was a very interesting lunch to say the least. We were also able to catch up with the CEO of Outblaze as well as Funambol, Hostopia & Tucows.

There was a lot of discussion about Google’s continuing expansion of Gmail and its Apps platform. There was evidently growing criticism of Google and people were quick to applaud when Google’s lack of customer service was mentioned. However, there were some Google stats that were quite interesting:

  • The average google search user will click on 1 paid advertisement out of every 6 clicks. However, in Gmail, that figure drops tremendously to 1 in 1440. This is most likely because the intent of the email lies with the sender and therefore it is hard to target ads towards the recipient(s).
  • The average google search user will generate somewhere around $35 per year in revenue for Google.
  • Nearly all of Google’s revenue remains tied to its advertising platform, despite it’s efforts to generate revenue elsewhere.

Just some early comments. More to come.