Gmail, Google’s email service started in April Fool’s Day in 2004 as the first to offer one gigabytes storage for its users. Major email services such as Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail soon followed with the fear of losing out in the market. Gmail remains an invitation-only email service since then. You couldn’t simply sign up for the service by filling in a form, there wasn’t one.
On Wednesday, Google has decided to lift the restriction to join the nearly 3-year-old service in North America and a swath of Asian and South American countries. The primary reason for the restriction was to give away time for Google to build up the infrastructure to accommodate the generous amount of free storage provided by the e-mail service. Google has built enough of them now. However, Gmail is retaining its “beta,” or test, status, signaling that Google still considers the service to be a work in progress.
In December, Gmail attracted 60 million unique visitors which is far behind Yahoo!’s 249 million and Hotmail’s 236 million. Advertising revenues remain a heavy weight in the revenue structure of companies like Google and Yahoo!. Advertisements are usually priced in proportion to the daily traffic of a site.