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Do Yahoo Users Have a Lower Credit Score?

Jeff Kershner

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May 1, 2005
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I found this article on CrunchBase and it got me thinking. Has anyone looked at all their customers with Yahoo email address to see if this could hold true?

It would be interesting to see if Polk and their lead scoring analytics would come up with the same conclusion. Maybe it's already apart of their algorithm and if not maybe it should be. Just thinking and thought I would share.


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Yahoo Mail just announced its first redesign in five years and it took the tech community 20 hours to notice. Meanwhile Aol Mail went down last week without making a sound. Imagine the echo chamber uproar if either had happened to Gmail.

So if we’re not using Aol and Yahoo, who is?

screen-shot-2010-10-26-at-6-30-26-pm.jpg

People with low credit scores according to Credit Karma. While the above chart doesn’t mean that changing your @gmail.com address to a @yahoo.com or an @aol.com will actually lower your score, it is showing that for one reason or another people that who use Yahoo Mail tend to score lower on their FICO analysis.

From Credit Karma:

“Certainly switching email providers will not increase or decrease your credit score. It’s more the case that people with a certain score have a greater likeliness to use a particular email provider. Why this happens is probably due to some demographic skew which then carries to the email domain.”

Of all the mail service providers, Yahoo definitely has the most users at 94.6 million uniques a month. In terms of user age, our parent company Aol Mail skews most heavily toward the 65+ age range (!), while Yahoo skews between 35-44, Hotmail 25-34 and Gmail the same at 25-34 according to comScore.

screen-shot-2010-10-26-at-6-27-16-pm1.jpg

In terms of household income, Yahoo Mail users are skewing towards the under $15k income bracket when compared to the rest of the Internet, despite the fact that a majority of users are in the $40K to $60K range.

Perhaps the fact that people who make less money (because they’re students or other people with no income) are overrepresented on Yahoo Mail might shed some light on the Credit Karma statistics?

In any case, you can add this to the pile of “What Your Email Address Says About You” posts. And, in this case, it says you’ve got bad credit.
 
I believe the demographics are different because of when (in time) those services were introduced. If you remember, AOL was the dominant portal/ISP/email service before any of the other ones (1983). Yahoo got it's start in 1995. Hotmail in 1996. Gmail in 2007.

People like to keep email addresses so, if you subscribe to this theory, older people would be on AOL simply because that's where they were FIRST. As time passed, people subscribed to other services.

I don't know about the credit scores though. Maybe I should change my Yahoo e-mail address. :)
 
I still have my AOL user name because I have had it since 1990. That doesn't mean I have some other email addresses, but I have used it so long that I don't want to get rid of it. It could be worse, I could have a Prodigy email address... Now back to work on my TRS-80 and Commodore 64!