Outlook just asked me if I want to upgrade to bigger ads

Like the ones in my Gmail.

I came across an EU site that now make you click accept before they show you the LINK to a youtube video.

This is a video they made themselves. It's really interesting

Such a disgustingly unethical design. What kind of sick people come up with this stuff?

Edit: Perhaps showing ads in line with real emails is less visually intrusive then traditional "banner" ads. I take issue specifically with the false choice presented to users in order to manipulate them.

then should n't that UI layout be specific only to EU users?

When did various mail providers start deciding to go from having a spam filter as a selling point to having spam built in?

plus email inboxes have a huge amount of valuable data it could be one of the most relevant ad experiences if they truly leveraged that data. I buy ads and don't have a problem with a lot of the industry, i'm minority on that here. To me highly relevant ads are way better than mortgage loan quicken shit ads and virus crap I see otherwise.

(In fairness, it was then and is now otherwise free of charge, isn’t it?)

buy airpods? start getting more ads for music

Presumably the reason they're pushing people toward inline ads is they're harder for adblockers to block?

Very glad I'm not using web-outlook (hotmail?) for my e-mail.

I'll also point out that it takes two to tango and most every internet content company is actively offering free stuff. I suspect one reason that ad-based revenue models are so hard to remove are because eliminating it would require coordinated effort on two separate axes:

1) Consumers would have to coordinate on, "From now on, let's pay for all our services"

AND

2) Companies would have to all agree, "Let's stop providing free product subsidized by ads"

Without some sort of drastic fundamental shift in technology or radical technological invention, I just don't see it happening. Maybe someone makes a killer OS or product that has ad-blocking built-in from the ground up and is also so amazing that everyone switches to it, and so suddenly ad revenue drops to near zero? I guess we can dream.

They're playing on the idea that users will think "Bigger ads? Why the hell would I want bigger ads? This is obviously a trick to try to get me to click that.", when in actual fact, Microsoft don't want that.

The choice is actually between having ads show up as faux-emails (making them difficult to avoid) and having them show up on the side (making them easier to ignore, despite the "Bigger ads" copy). They want you to pick the option where you don't have banner blindness.

https://roundcube.net/

Despite webmail's many flaws, I haven't found an MUA that's as good for me as the Gmail web UI.

- Most MUAs choke on my archive. Simple searches take seconds.

- Every modern email service has a tag-like construct. Representing tags in IMAP duplicates messages.

- Decades later, IMAP sync is still slow, unreliable, and annoying to debug.

- A surprising number of MUAs ignore account boundaries when integrating with my contacts.

- Depending on my job, I go through years-long periods with lots of calendar-related mail. Tight integration between Google Calendar and my mail client is very convenient.

- I use snoozes and (especially) delayed sends often.

- I use all these features on my phone, too.

I haven't found an email client that solves all these problems, on both my laptop and my phone, that's better than Gmail web UI + Gmail iOS app. With two exceptions, all the clients I've tried are slower and less reliable, and they often have fewer features important to me. These days, they're often a less-polished, poorly-tested website in an Electron container. I'm happy to pay for GSuite (or whatever they're calling it these days), because I get ad-free clients that work for me and excellent uptime/deliverability.

* The only genuinely good clients I've found are Mailbox (never shipped a stable desktop client, but had useful innovations) and Superhuman. Mailbox was discontinued post-acquisition, and Gmail has implemented their best features. Superhuman is fine, but not worth paying for (though I'd perhaps feel differently if I spent hours each day in email).

I use webmail + Firefox containers to access multiple inboxes at the same time. I have like half a dozen email accounts that I access regularly, so it works well.

Pay with your wallet or pay with your eyeballs & personal information.

What is very unusual here is that they are asking you if you want bigger ads, a slower experience, and recommend that you don't chose that option. There is also an ad free, paid alternative in the small print.

It is the opposite of what the usual suggestions are. Generally, the most predominant is the paid option, then the one with big ads, then the one with small ads.

The most probable reason here is that they want to show you that if you don't like integrated ads that look like emails, you can, but it will be terrible. Maybe it is a legal requirement or something.

In the thread on Twitter Adam Waltham stated (imho quite correctly):

'This is the point, they want to make “show the ads separately from your mail” sound like a bad option, because they make more money when the ads are disguised as emails in your inbox.'

So this very dark pattern is designed to make you not click to see bigger ads. They want you to have ads disguised as emails in your inbox. And because you choose the are legally in the clear in the EU because there new regulation (as stated other places in this thread already) requires them to.