Google Begins Testing Display Ads in Gmail - The Atlantic | Hacker News Reader

Google Begins Testing Display Ads in Gmail - The Atlantic

theatlantic.com

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(imo) Just another sign that Google, like any other big company, is being overrun by incompetent PowerPoint slinging managers with stupid ideas, optimizing for short term results. Or maybe they are just running out of ideas as the company bloats and ages. See the catch-up-to-bing-with-junk-UI-redesign efforts for example.

If this is a success then one more small step and we'll get image ads for search. The same justifications(and PowerPoint Decks) can be reused with minor tweaks.

This does seem like bait and switch, as jacquesm points out. Sad, but IMAP + Adblock should be enough as a short term fix I guess.

I haven't yet used AdBlock on Google ads because they are largely unobtrusive text ads, but if this junk starts showing up in my Inbox I will.

Longer term Google needs some decent competition, especially in the search space. Too dominant a position in any market is fertilizer for hubris.

I have not been able to block google text ads with adblock despite15 minutes of peering at the page source.

I don't see any ads yet - I guess they haven't rolled them out?

Can you show me a screenshot?

What pushed me into using Adblock is that every so often adds turn out to be security problems. Sure, it is rare and fixed quickly but if they show up in my gmail account, which I use for authentication, I will start looking for another email service.

Anyone know of a great, secure and add free email service?

This is a good point. If and as they proceed, they'd better run more than the usual level of due diligence to insure they don't become a vector for something nasty.

Google properties are some of the few I let through without a lot of filtering (Gmail in particular). If it looks like they are becoming a vector, this will lessen their utility for me and I will tighten the hatches on them.

(Of course, I suppose this factor won't apply for 99% of their users. We may be the outliers having no statistical significance. At least, until something big enough and bad enough slips through.)

I have mixed feelings about blocking advertising that provides supporting revenue, but two factors override: Motion (and occasionally, sound), that completely and thoroughly distracts me from the page content and which, over prolonged exposure, leaves me "frazzled" and ineffective; and malware. (Also, when graphics are overwhelmingly "bright" compared to the content, I need to dial them down.)

Nothing that hasn't been said a thousand times before, I suppose.

I too fear we are outliers.

But surely there must be a market for people like us who are also more likely to be high earners and tech opinion setters. And surely there must a way for a company to build trust and explain how/when/where advertising will be displayed that is acceptable to people like us, and everyone wins. Market opportunity?

I've thought so. Haven't gotten my act together, yet, though, with respect to tackling it.

EDIT: I guess that can sound kind of narcissistic. But, this is a forum with a start up focus. So I feel I have some license to at least think in that direction. :-)

I welcome the rare ad that presents me a relevant, effective product. Making ads visually pronounced (i.e. dominant) does NOT make them effective, for me. Make them relevant, tell me why in a brief bit of text, and try to whittle them down to effective products.

[In editing, my language became rather redundant. Perhaps because there's a particular point to those words.]

Also note, Google: Once they start to move (or speak), I'm "outta here". (IMAP, then whatever's next.) Just sayin'.

I'm fearful, because there are a lot of people who do respond to "primary colors, dialed to 11". Perhaps Google/Gmail needs to remember those "surveys" from a year or three ago, wherein it was "demonstrated" that the smart people use Gmail -- the ones you want resumes from.

Do you really want to become Hotmail?

(Meanwhile, thanks for all the years so far of a great product. Hope we can find a workable compromise.)

I'd love to see the effect that these ads have on the users of Gmail, both from Google's statistical end and also from a customer sentiment angle.

Gmail has touted the clean and simple feel as one of their main features for so long that users may come to expect that of Gmail now. Understandably Google has the right to show these ads considering it's a free service but will their users see it the same way?

Could this open the field back up for new email competitors?

On a personal note (and I'm not seeing them at this stage - just checked a few emails), the graphic ad per se won't bother me. I use Gmail personally, in basically the same headspace I use Facebook - I doubt Gmail ads will phase me if they become as graphical and ubiquitous as Facebook ads, and frankly they'll get just as many click-throughs from me (read: zero).

What does concern me is the point you raise about the fact that Gmail "touted the clean and simple feel as one of their main features". In a world of garishly fugly html emails, my inbox is rarely clean and simple, but Google changing their position on this does create a market opportunity. And not everyone will feel as non-impacted as I do.

I also agree with you that Google has the right to do this in their own free service - if they want to, they can go for it, and if that creates a competitor, I look forward to another webmail battle.

  * User numbers will continue to grow
  * CTR for ads will jump up
  * Revenue will jump up
  * This'll be old news by next week and no one
    will care anymore about the change

WD Google.

Bait and switch. At least it took a few years.

This is typical, I remember when gmail was rolled out and the lack of display advertising was touted as one of the big advantages over competitors (the others were a very large amount of storage and a really effective spam filter).

Let's see if the competition uses this as a way to get an edge over google.

Yeah damn them for giving the world an awesome free email service and then having the audacity to try and make some revenue from advertising. They should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves. Scratch that, they should be done for fraud.

I want my money back!!! Oh wait...

Right. When you launch a service and point at the competition and say 'look, no display ads, come join us' then you will be reminded of that when you change tack later.

That does not diminish the quality of the actual service and does not diminish the right of google to try to make as much revenue as they can.

It's just a good reminder that corporate promises amount to very little.

Can you cite a reference there? I never heard GMail being touted as "Like the competition, but no display ads". I was a fairly early user, and never heard it talked of like that. Infact I remember the opposite - they got quite a lot of flack basing the advertising on the content of your emails.

Some references to these "promises" would be cool also.

Personally, I don't use GMail because it doesn't have display ads, I don't care about advertising, sometimes it's useful, sometimes not. I like seeing it, because often it is useful.

I use GMail because it's a fantastic email client. Search is instant, features other email clients only dream of. etc etc. A display ad doesn't take away from that.

There's a line of acceptability with advertising. Display ads is still extremely tame and non intrusive. When they start doing popups, popunders, video ads with sound, the underlining of keywords with popup contextual ads, etc... then I'd be up in arms too.

> Can you cite a reference there?

No, this is not an academic paper.

But I distinctly recall the case being made that 'hotmail' and 'yahoo' mail had interfaces that were considered inferior not because of their technical capabilities but because of being loaded up with advertising and that this was one of googles major plus points. The fact that the advertising was based on the contents of your emails was the flipside of that coin at the time so that's what people based their decision on.

> Some references to these "promises" would be cool also.

Another thing that google promised (and that I distinctly remember) was that they wouldn't do 'paid placements' in the results, they broke that promise and weaseled through the cracks by putting a little background colour on the ads.

(for instance: http://www.google.com/search?q=black+socks shows an ad for blacksocks.com as the first result for me the first time I hit that search)

> Display ads is still extremely tame and non intrusive. When they start doing popups, popunders, video ads with sound, the underlining of keywords with popup contextual ads, etc... then I'd be up in arms too.

Ok, so we'll wait for a while then we simply draw the line in different places.

Youtube now has video overlay ads and leaders on some videos, I don't see anything keeping google from doing the same.

I no longer use gmail, I got a few ads that showed just a bit too much insight in to the contents of the email than what I'm comfortable with. I do still have a gmail account because I use it to log in to a bunch of google services but no more gmail for me, I'll take the bit of extra spam that I get as the price to pay for that decision.

And my email client (thunderbird) does not show any advertising at all, keywords or otherwise.

Fair enough. In terms of a business decision though, this will result in increased revenue, and 99.99999% of users won't care. So good on them.

There's a huge difference between paid placement and ads--labelled "Ads"--that correspond to search results.

The google of 2000 would never have polluted their search page like that. Not to mention all the google owned property links in the search results (and those are not labeled 'ad').

That's just because in 2000, they were trying to get as much market share as possible. Also they probably didn't need to get more revenue at the time.

It sounds like you're trying to argue that Google has abandoned their core beliefs, or been overrun with profit driven accountants or something.

I'm pretty sure the "get users, then figure out revenue" is a very widely used strategy. Google are just more on the second part than the first...

>> Can you cite a reference there?

> No, this is not an academic paper.

If you can't support your assertions, they are worthless, regardless of what the context is. Asking for citations is a really common practice on HN, and one which almost always improves the conversation; despite the fact that you're one of the most prolific members, you still need to conform to community standards.

> you still need to conform to community standards.

Can you cite a reference there?

Hmmm. The closest I can find is "If people are expected to behave well, they tend to; and vice versa."[1] There's nothing in the guidelines that's even similar, except for avoiding comments with no substance. I suppose that, as long as you're civil about it, there's no need to do anything that the community expects.

However, this was exactly my point; being called out to provide a citation and actually responding to the request (as opposed to saying "No, this is not an academic paper. But I distinctly recall ...") tends to lead to changing the views of at least one person in the conversation. The last time I was called upon to provide a citation, I wasn't able to find a credible one, and adjusted my beliefs appropriately; therefor, I'm of the opinion that refusing to provide a citation is evidence that you know that you're wrong (or, occasionally, that a single search would find the citation; that isn't the case here, I tried. Almost all of the results involve how Gmail was seen as a huge advance for having simple text ads which were relevant to the content of emails they were displayed next to).

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

There's no point moaning "Google promised us X" if you can't back that up.

I think you're confusing the adverts displayed in the gmail interface with the sorts of ads that Yahoo and Hotmail used to run -- bloated signatures tacked onto the bottom of each email itself.

I can't remember Google not showing text advertising through its interface, but do remember them being very different for not bombarding your contacts with advertising slipped into in the emails they sent.

Ashamed? No. Out-competed by an advertising free email service - yes.

1. Install an email client of your choice: Outlook, Evolution, Thunderbird, etc.

2. Enable IMAP access in GMail settings https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&shva=1#settings/fwdan...

3. Configure your client https://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=75726

Done, now I can check my email without ads! I can even (depending on client & configuration) search emails with my platform search tool: Spotlight, Windows Search, etc.

From http://searchengineland.com/google-testing-display-ads-in-gm...:

We're always trying out new ad formats and placements in Gmail, and we recently started experimenting with image ads on messages with heavy image content.

Interesting. I wonder what 'image-heavy' is; attached images, or embedded images that get blocked anyway...

Google wants to target more (and better-converting) display advertisements on daily deal subscription emails (ie. Groupon, LivingSocial), which always feature plenty of images and style and are incredibly lucrative.

I only really use gmail as a spam filter anyway, forwarding mail to another account, so I avoid seeing any banner ads or other nonsense.

My advice to any Google people who might be reading is to keep gmail as clean looking as possible, and avoid image based ads (especially animated ones).

Remember, folks: A/B testing a feature does not equal large-scale deployment. The question isn't whether this move is right, or wrong, but rather, is a statistically significant proportion of the target demographic going to click through to justify the PR loss?

Yes. The CTR and revenue for image ads is way above text ads. This is a good move.

By "PR loss" I assume you mean "geeks moan for an hour or 2 on hacker news" ;)

I wonder how many people would pay 3 dollars a month for a clean, usable webmail interface for their domain.

Some would, but most people would continue to use a free service. It would have to seriously be causing the average user a pain to have them switch. More likely would be another free service that could be the gmail of years past and they would slowly become what gmail is today.

Not many, AdBlock is free. Could be a nice product if enough webmail interface providers would be able/willig to work around AdBlock.

I have already moved the bulk of my e-mail from gmail to my own domain. I was expecting something like this from Google - once an advertiser, always an advertiser.

There are quite a few for-pay email providers that do a great job. My favorite is Fastmail.fm, which was bought by Opera last year.

That's exactly what I pay Rackspace Email for. My email is my most important communication medium, it's also the nexus and backup access mechanism for most of my online accounts via password reset. You'd have to be mad to leave something so important to a free service with no SLA and no customer service where you account could disappear overnight without recourse.

Zenbe Mail was exactly that: a paid webmail service with great and clean design for $3-10 dollars a month. But they closed the service after the engineers joined Facebook as part of a talent acquisition. Not sure how successful they service was in terms of revenue/subscriptions though.

How many of us actually access gmail via gmail.com anymore? It's an exchange account on my phone, which syncs all of my contacts, and my calendar, and an IMAP account on my desktops. The only time I ever actually sign into gmail.com is when I need to set up a new filter (if I sign up for a new mailing list or something), or if I want to use gmail's search.

I think the average person minds ads much less than the average programmer/technical person. Just my personal experience. An online example would be the constant barrage against advertising on Reddit, which you don't really see in communities with different demographics.

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