Gmail Shows Images By Default - How Will It Change Email Stats?

John Rae-Grant, the Product Manager of Gmail announced yesterday that “Images Now Showing” in Gmail. This is good for us email marketers and will definitely change all email marketing stats. Why?

Because email analytics is based on downloading images. For years if your subscribers used Gmail and didn’t click on the “Display images” link, you couldn’t see their email opens in your email marketing system. This is the reason why Gmail was so low in all email market share statistics, for example according to Litmus stats Gmail has only 3% share from all email opens (as of 13 December 2013).

How will it influence Gmail’s share from the email client market? Will this update be enough for a TOP5 rank? What’s your opinion?