Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users
techradar.com
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There is (or was, anyway) an opportunity for a very long-term play in which Google or similar companies resist the profit urge, make enough money to cover costs and sock away plenty for moonshots and continued development. Focused on optimizing products for users, rather than for revenue, they could have become the Everything platform.
But I guess now it's time to start looking at different email providers.
[1] https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys
The best part is you don't go through 15 minutes of robo voice assistance debugging hell.
Google Fi is a perfect example of how horrible Google is at customer service. They start new projects with reasonable CS but they simply can not scale it as the service takes on more users- or they drop it on purpose to improve their margins.
I had insurance on the box but the buyer wouldn't return the box to Fedex for inspection. (Because it was fraud)
Getting this fixed was excruciating and ended up having to DM people on LinkedIn and guess their internal e-mail addresses to get this resolved. Absolutely horrible!
We won't get anything other than this unless Google decides to do a huge round of buybacks and go private. The spice must flow because only growth makes money for the people who actually own Google.
And after they go private why do you think they won't care about growth/money?
When you're private you can actually say, "you know what, I'm content where we are being filthy rich."
You have no guarantee a private owner wouldn't speed up the enshittification process.
Sure, but as a private company at least you control who who wants to do that and are not bound by the "the price must go up" behavior of the shareholders since you only care about the dividends (this is a oversimplification).
You who? The owner?
> behavior of the shareholders
The owner is a shareholder too. It's all the same thing, you're creating distinction where there is none. If anything a public company has way more controls and transparency. People usually cry when a company is taken private by private equity to squeeze every cent out of it. What do you think private equity is if not "a private owner not bound by shareholders"?
Search actually seems like it got this treatment first, and in a creeping slow way, and it wasn't even necessarily 100% Google's fault. It seems like it probably got pushed a long at first by SEO types.. and then at some point Google realized it was profitable to actually play along with the whole game.
It's not about whether they are happier, are making the world better, or have enough. It's only about having more at all costs.
I wouldn’t want to and won’t if I was ever lucky enough to have the opportunity.
But what are the alternatives?
And that's fine, but I wish we lived in a society where "runs a company that doesn't mistreat users" (or treats employees well, or helps the planet, etc) was clearly more important to someone's reputation than the size of their yacht.
This may or may not be the opinion of people in the position to actually assess it. It can be the difference between being able to go to a place you want to go or not, based on range or seaworthiness. It can be the difference between having an amenity on the craft or not.
Or a mistress or three.
And you have to crew the yachts - usually more crew than passengers.
And a helicopter, and a private jet.
Those'll chew up 300 mill easily.
(Yes there are diminishing marginal returns etc., but once you’re used to X, 50% of X feels painful, even if 50% of X is still an extremely luxurious lifestyle)
Let's say that X is your favorite food. If you already have 100x the amount you could ever eat, a 50% reduction won't feel painful at all, because you'll still have far more than you could ever eat.
I'd posit that at a certain point, you have more of everything than you could ever use, except for things that demonstrate your wealth to others. The naming rights to buildings are one example—they don't actually increase your quality of life in any way, they just show how wealthy you are.
Maybe I was wrong about the threshold for this, and it's actually higher than $200 million dollars, but it can't be that far off...
Perhaps it is, but your reputation among which group? HN users or the other billionaires that you're hanging out with?
After all, their employees — especially the executives — are the group of people a CEO is surrounded by every working day. So, assuming they're neither a sociopath nor an Effective Altruist, why wouldn't they feel a strong empathetic desire to "help" the people right in front of them?
And presuming they want to help those people, why wouldn't they then conclude that the best, most scalable way they have to do that, is to make sure that those people are all set for life by holding high-value amounts of company stock; and that the most comparative-advantage-y way the CEO has of accomplishing that, is to make the share price go up?
Or, to put that another way: a pirate captain doesn't go home once they're personally rich. They made a (perhaps unstated) agreement with their crew: they won't go home until everyone is rich, and they can all comfortably retire. Until then, they'll continue to exploit others for their own gain.
Not entirely true. They are squeezed left and right by Apple. Google pay Apple per active user as the default search engine. As Apple continue to increase their user base, the higher the total cost for Google to remain default. All while Apple, in the name of privacy and fundamental human right, started a crusade against online ads, mainly targeting Facebook but tactically taking Google along with it. In order for Google and Facebook to keep the same profit margin with declining CPM, they have to place more ads to compensate for it. Which is the whole starting point of enshittification. This may also have some negative side effect on Google image and Android, and more people switching to Apple.
>There is (or was, anyway) an opportunity for a very long-term play in which Google
There was never any long term plan or strategy from Google. Moonshots were like a fun project to work on with zero business planning. Google never had a product mindset. They could have done what you wrote, they could have battled Microsoft for OS dominance, they could have done shit loads of things. But they didn't. I have been watching Google before they even IPO. For vast majority of its life they have always been in a more money ( or capital ) than they know what to do with it.
I don't know if I would call that squeezed. They aren't required to be the default search engine. They run the bigger global platform (Android) and I would guess they get to be the default there for free?
Google incentivizes it's employees in a certain way. Those employees have a very high expectation of not only income but wealth.
Management has demonstrated an ability to waste an enormous amount of that money (Alphabet/Google is certainly not alone in that regards.) Because they own a monopoly they can get away with it. Because the monopoly is in advertising they don't have to be that exceptional in terms of delivering new and improved products. Because of the stock ownership structure and because they've had tremendous revenue growth for so long they really haven't had to answer to their investors about their failure and waste. In some regards a lot of those investors are asleep and don't really understand what is going on.
However, the managers need to crank the monetization dial to hit whatever incentives are set for them to become wealthy or grow whatever wealth they already have.
This is a bag of tricks (the monetization dial) that has worked well for over a decade. When it runs out, Google's revenue growth will end and employees will no longer get to become wealthy by being employees. Maybe they will suddenly get a lot of capital discipline and experience a second wind like Microsoft appears to have. Maybe they will start looking more like Yahoo. To be determined.
Imagine you create a newspaper, you start out showing no ads, lots of people buy it, it is all good.
Then you raise money from investors to grow, and they start asking for more revenue. So you add one advertisement.
Then the investors want out, so you have to IPO...more ads. Then you have to keep the share price up because execs want options, and your HR consultant tells you that the "top" execs need to see a rising share price (as if you need a "top" exec to add more ads to a webpage)...more ads.
The ability to add more advertisements is limited by the space in the newspaper, but there is almost no marginal cost associated with adding more ads. So it looks like very clean growth, very strong economics.
This is basically how Google and Facebook work. Their revenue growth looks puzzling because they seem to achieve very consistent, very predictable revenue growth with no extra resources. The reason why is that they can add more ads to a page very easily, and can control their level of revenue growth so they can keep employees/investors happy (in that order). It is true that they have also achieved some pricing growth but that advantage has been capped (and is largely a function of their monopolistic position, i.e. Doubleclick allows Google to play both sides). Most of their growth has been increasing ads per page.
There is no way for them to function as public companies in this environment (again, I would say the situation with employees is actually taken more seriously than investors) without making their product worse. They won't stop before the product collapses.
You are also limited by potentially causing users to stop buying the newspaper. Google will be matching the metrics to see if users actually use the app less when adding more ads. It's possibile there will be no statistically significant difference and consumers are okay with the new ad level. If they start leaving Google can revert the change.
I have never seen a company stop before this point either. The institutional imperative to continue gaming the numbers is overwhelming.
Hasn't most of their growth come from a growing number of internet users?
Japan CPC $1.32 CPM $0.38 United States CPC $1.09 CPM $0.22 Poland CPC $0.26 CPM $0.06 India CPC $0.25 CPM $0.13
funny numbers! 1.09/0.22 = 4.95 while 0.25/0.13 = 1.93 !?! Apparently Indian eyeballs are really expensive!
Fun stuff, thanks.
In the early days, you saw very real pricing growth (due to better targeting) and volume growth due to user growth. Over the last ten years or so, I believe that a lot of the growth has been greater ad density, and ad density is much more important for controlling financial results...which is the key point when it comes to exec behaviour. Execs can't turn on user growth, they can add more ads to a product if they see numbers coming in light.
Already moved to Proton personally, I was OK with Google G-Suite or whatever the hell it's called these days when it was free, because I was trading my data for a pretty good service, but then they wanted to slap a price tag on it simply because they could, and to me that was a clear signal it was time to get out.
I'm not paying for Google to monetise my data.
Protons spam filter isn't as good, the keyboard shortcuts are taking some getting used to (really wish they would implement a "Gmail-like keyboard shortcuts" option), and message search could be improved (I'm sure it will), but besides those I don't miss a thing, and knowing that my privacy is respected is by itself worth the price tag.
I'm surprised it this has taken this long to be honest. I expected everything to turn to shit with in a years of going public.
We don't need "real linux" phone, we already have mobile OS based on linux, it's called Android. You can decouple it from Google, companies already do that, it works. Whether an Android phone without Google services is a viable product is another discussion - and IMO the one we should focus on.
I wonder which genius adsense manager thought "hey we could double our revenue if we show 4 ads instead of 2, user experience be damned".
That is a good thing, isn't it?
Obviously the “effort” is in the opposite direction
take their home assistant, which used to be able to find information online and compose an answer to your natural langauges queries. Now she just says "I don't know, but I found this online..."
Google Search seems to be getting truly terrible. Results completely unrelated to what I'm looking for are placing in the first page of results.
Android seems to get more janky by the day. Lots of UI elements across different apps that mostly work, but sometimes don't. Holding the power button no longer turns off your phone, but instead opens voice assistant(?!) Changing a long-standing and universal power-off gesture to what used to be the screenshot gesture was rage inducing when I had to go and figure out how to power off my phone again.
Content sharing is a disaster on Android too. They keep INSISTING you use their specific 'share' buttons for webpages, none of which are consistent. Sharing a link from Google Now? click the share icon, then copy. Do not use the "Copy link" button, which only sometimes works. Using google image search? Hit the three dots icon, and then "share" text, and then click copy. Don't you dare try and long press on the image. I assume funneling everything through the OS share menu adds telemetry to both what is being shared, and who it is going to.
Removing the fingerprint reader from the back of the pixel devices is a huge flop imo. It was very useful to bring down the setting shade, and was way more reliably than the under-screen reader. And now they have a foldable pixel device. I've never seen anyone use a foldable phone.
It's like nobody at Google actually uses their products. I've been a long-time android user but it's becoming harder to justify as nobody at Google actually seems to give a damn about their products anymore. :-(
I find Google Search Ads ( excluding partner network ) to be disappointing in recent years. Layers of complexity and reduced effectiveness.
With Google Ads I believe a decline is on the way for the company.
No one breached their moat, they are just screwing it on their own. Making it progressively worse.
Whenever Apple locks people into one of their properties, people say, "ooh, smart move". Maybe it is, but it's shitty. Siri couldn't turn my lights off, for example, and Google and Alexa have no trouble with that.
Google "full screen mode Safari iPad" for another highly confusing design decision. In portrait mode, Safari of course fills up the screen with chrome. iOS is full of these annoying little features that are WONTFIX.
I've got an up-to-date Pixel 6 and this is not true. Hold the power button, and I'm presented with options for powering off, restarting, making an emergency call and "Lockdown".
... so look forward to that on your next Pixel, I guess.
But the sesame seed bun manufacturer continues the experiment. They continue to remove the seeds, making small savings each time, until eventually: they just start selling buns with no sesame seeds. The bun sells for the same price as the seeded one. But the core value prop has been lost due to greed. Exactly what's happening here at Google.
So shareholders are paying for the exec, and they are paying for the consultant who is doing the exec's job?
If you work as an exec at MCD, working this out is the kind of thing that you should know. It is the reason why you are being paid money to be there.
The job of the executive isn't to know the answer to every question. Their job is to make sure questions get answered. There are an infinite number of ways you can do this and hiring a consultant is a valid option.
If his job is as simple as hiring consultants, why do you need to pay someone $1m+/year to hire a consultant. Just hire a guy on $10k/year who tells you to hire a consultant.
It isn't a valid option. This is one of the reasons why most corporations are poorly managed (right now, I would guess that there are maybe 10 CEOs of US listed companies who will go down as great CEOs...that is being optimistic, almost every CEO is paid like they are a star). Their "thinking" is outsourced to someone hiring a bunch of grads with no experience, that is what consultants are...it is like advertising, churn and burn grads.
A key part of making better decisions is taking those decisions yourself and learning from the outcomes. But the way things happen now, all of the experience is gone and it is just a revolving treadmill of people who move through jobs too quickly to ever see the result of what they did or take responsibility for it. Hiring consultants is an indication that the company lacks executives with the capacity to perform their function correctly (unfortunately, this is the case at most companies now).
I hire consultants and outsource activities all the time. It isn't all I do but a key part of it. There's no chance you'd find someone to do my job for 10K a year. There is no chance I would want to hire dozens of employees each time I have a rare off question.
Your example and position make no sense: hiring an outside group is always wrong and hiring inside team is always right. I don't learn anything different either way. You call it a basic function, but what if I wont want to indefinitely keep a team on staff to answer seed questions?
Produce buns with 200, 100, 50 seeds and do consumer surveys. Find that sweet spot before people start doubting the value proposition.
Edit: Any idiot can build a burger that people like, but it takes an engineer to build a burger that is just tolerable.
"We did X, it went very badly...don't worry, we have fired the consultant who was responsible"...the question you want to ask (but cannot) is then: why I am paying the salary for the monkey, not the organ-grinder? The worst part is that I have seen this at companies that are doing well, you just have to accept the fact that you are getting pickpocketed by a bunch of idiots who control the money printer.
If that's why the answer is wrong, having paid a consultant is still a better answer than we didn't try and simply guessed.
Similarly, I believe Oreos have been optimized to death. A current Double Stuff is actually smaller than the original regular Stuff.
Because if consumers genuinely don't notice the sesame seeds are gone, that means they never cared in the first place, and this is a better outcome for everyone. Why were farmers growing useless sesame seeds in the first place? Now they can switch to blueberries or whatever and the world is better off. It's kind of like, thank god those nasty canned olive slices finally disappeared from salads. Also, the company can't get away with raised prices because those buns are still next to regular buns from other companies, and consumers will buy the cheapest one. (Or if inflation is happening, everybody's raising prices, but that has nothing to do with sesame seeds.)
On the other hand, if consumers are actively seeking out sesame seed buns, there is absolutely a point at which they notice and say, what the hell, this brand hardly has any sesame seeds, I'm going to buy the competing brand that still has a normal amount of sesame seeds. The company sees sales are plummeting, and they quickly add back seeds until people are buying them again. But there is an optimal number of sesame seeds here. It makes no sense to double the sesame seeds when consumers don't care.
The idea that a company can keep removing something consumers want to pay for, but they won't notice, just doesn't exist in the real world. In the real world, either consumers do want to pay for it and sales will suffer, or it turns out consumers don't actually want to pay for it and the company gives consumers a simplified product that is still subject to market price competition like every other product, and everybody is better off for it.
> The idea that a company can keep removing something consumers want to pay for, but they won't notice, just doesn't exist in the real world.
Have you heard of shrinkflation?
But yes, everybody's heard of shrinkflation, so I don't know what your point is.
When inflation is happening or product-specific input costs are increasing, companies can either raise prices or shrink quantities. They have to do one or the other if they want to stay in business.
Consumers are well aware of what's happening. Everybody knows a Haagen Dazs "pint" isn't a pint anymore.
But shrinkflation isn't bad and it isn't hidden. If someone doesn't want to pay more than $5 for a container of ice cream, then keeping the price $5 but reducing the quantity is better meeting consumer demand, than keeping the size but upping the price to $6. It's the better tradeoff.
In fact, shrinkflation is a perfect example of my argument -- 10 oz bags of potato chips haven't shrunk down to 1 oz. It happens in a narrow band, just like the number of sesame seeds might. Things don't shrink down until they just disappear, unless consumers want them to.
On the other hand, if consumers see that sawdust is one of the top four ingredients in the ingredients list, nobody's going to buy it.
So I don't know what your point is, because your hypothetical would never happen.
Whereas phasing olive slices out of salads is something that's happened. Or replacing fancy glossy plastic clamshell packaging with cheaper generic recyclable cardboard packaging when buying things online.
Only if someone actually notices and raises enough of a stink to get other people to notice. This can take a surprisingly long time.
Replace 'sawdust' with 'cheapest sugar available' and that is something happens all of the time, and is arguably worse, because sawdust doesn't cause addiction, diabetes, heart disease or obesity.
Although a joke, sawdust is listed as 'cellulose' in food ingredients, and it's commonly used in food[2].
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKDal51f5LU
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/07/10/329767647/fr...
If you are an exec at MCD, your main focus is on making numbers. That is it. Your bonus is based on this, your options are based on beating expectations...nothing else matters.
What this means in practice is that companies look for ways to cut costs and fill gaps when a number comes in light (because you can cut costs immediately but growing revenue requires long-term investment). And, over time, you see significant deterioration in product from lots of decisions made to make a number in a quarter.
An even more interesting aspect of this problem is that these companies only ever cut back on things like product. FMCGs were doing this for years, and most companies in the sector were still horribly overstaffed.
You are right, this doesn't happen in industries where there is more competition. But this is not true for almost every consumer-facing product where there are limits to competition. Indeed, FMCGs have been reducing product quality for years but it has only been changing consumer tastes that has led to more innovation through new products/categories. In other wards, no-one tries to start a new mayonnaise company because Hellmann's began adding more oil...you try to get distribution into the large grocery stores, and they will laugh you out the door (but you turn up with a vegan mayonnaise, and they are interested).
Another example of this is Tesco in the UK. They are famous for producing executives which make a series of short-term decisions over a very long period that add up to a bad situation (and there is no new competition, Tesco over-index to locations that have no other supermarket chains...you would lose tens of billions trying to just get a foothold).
If nothing else matters than making numbers in a quarter, if companies "only ever cut back on things like product", then how do you explain this example of actual corporate behavior?
It's not like McD's vs Burger King is full of competition in a way that Hellman's vs Miracle Whip isn't, to use your mayonnaise example. (Or Kraft, or store-brand, to continue with mayo.)
This idea that there are major "limits to competition" in "almost every consumer-facing product" just isn't reality. Companies compete with each other ruthlessly.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/mcdonalds-t...
Like, not a distant competitor like Bing that poses some hypothetical future threat, but like, a present threat to Google Search that they battle against daily.
Likewise for the major other properties - Gmail? YouTube?
The only products where there is IMO intense daily competition is Android and Chrome, where Google's dominance is far from complete. In Google's top money-making properties the competition is pretty mild, and IMO we're seeing user-hostile changes because of it.
I would liken McDonald's more to Android than to Google Search. It exists in a furiously competitive landscape where market share moves significantly year-to-year, and despite being a dominant brand within its space it doesn't even come close to owning the entire space.
In any case, that's neither here nor there, I would like to engage with something you brought up that I do think is interesting:
> "On the other hand, if consumers are actively seeking out sesame seed buns, there is absolutely a point at which they notice and say, what the hell, this brand hardly has any sesame seeds, I'm going to buy the competing brand that still has a normal amount of sesame seeds."
This is true! And I think this moment is coming for Google. You are right - there are limits to how much you can shit up a product before consumers respond. I think the main thrust of your idea is legitimate: while a near-monopoly in a product category gives you a lot of leeway to fuck about with the product, that leeway is not infinite! At some point you're accountable to your users!
The argument isn't so much whether or not that threshold exists (IMO it clearly does), it's what happens organizationally when the company reaches that threshold and can't deal with it. If you've spent the last 10 years staffing your corporate management with sesame-removers, what happens when you finally hit the thresholds and your customers flee?
That to me is the more interesting question - whether or not Google's culture and staffing can navigate what's coming. They have hobbled along on early successes for too long, and IMO it remains to be seen if they are constitutionally able to handle a product crisis.
Bing is what Google battles against daily. Bing is such a competitive threat that when reports came out three weeks ago that Samsung products might switch to Bing as a default, Google's stock dropped 4% [1]. Google has been innovating its search furiously over years and years because competition is just a click away -- knowledge cards, snippets, massive machine learning under the hood. Google pays Apple something like $8-12 billion a year to maintain its default. Google wouldn't do that if it didn't see Bing as a present threat.
> Likewise for the major other properties - Gmail? YouTube?
Microsoft Outlook? TikTok? Gigantic competitors. More businesses pay for Outlook than do for Gmail. And TikTok is crushing YouTube among teens [2].
[1] https://www.reuters.com/technology/alphabet-falls-report-sam...
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/07/tiktok-is-crushing-youtube...
It is reality, I worked in equity research specializing in consumer products so am reasonably familiar with the space. Consumers just see the product, but the economics are about a lot more. The actual product is but one area of competition (as I explained, just anecdotally product-focused consumer companies are the best kind of shorts because they will almost always saturate their market and be unable to build an area of solid competitive advantage...because product doesn't really matter).
I suspect you will have a problem comprehending this again, so to be clear: this does not mean that companies do not compete on product. It just means that product is often not the predominant factor.
I am not sure what you are saying but there is less competition in FMCG than QSR. Distribution consolidated heavily, and FMCGs have consolidated heavily too because the game is largely about expanding SKUs on existing distributor relationships (the economic model is actually very similar to Google, if you have a distribution network then it improves economics to add SKUs...this has been key for PEP) and advertising spend.
If you look at QSR, a lot of the product innovation that you see is superficial because of the limits of the operating model. Most of the "product innovation" is competition on advertising, there is real competition here (unlike with FMCG where ad spend is often defensive) because of consumer behaviour/the product consumption cycle (if you have ever been outside the US, you will realise that advertising on US TV is extremely unusual in this regard). And property has definitely become more important over the past decade (the growing chains are ones that have grown into the demographic shifts of the past ten years, chains with locations in legacy areas, i.e. malls, that are in decline have suffered).
Again, there is no competition at the margin. The world doesn't work that way. If MCD remove sesame seeds from their bun, there is not going to be a new entrant with more seeds. Maybe they add more seeds, maybe they add more sauce but that doesn't change that if they removed seeds to make numbers (which has happened before), there is very little risk to their competitive position. Again, the proof of this is how the world actually works, not based on some theoretical model of competition that you just thought up sitting in your bedroom.
And sure nobody starts a mayo company but Hellman's is absolutely competing in the same product category with relatively newer entrants such as e.g. Amazon Brand, or Whole Foods 365 brand, on top of other long-existing competitors. My example was directly addressing your topic -- perhaps you're the one who needs to read what I said again. Because according to you, it's inexplicable that McD's is improving their Big Mac by adding sauce.
But just because you don't seem to be understanding my point, let me try one more time with another one of your examples:
> If MCD remove sesame seeds from their bun, there is not going to be a new entrant with more seeds.
Popeye's was winning the chicken sandwich wars, so McDonald's launched their McCrispy. Shake Shack was popularizing better-tasting burgers, so McDonald's switched from frozen to fresh made-to-order quarter pounders. Competition is alive and well.
If McDonald's removed sesame seeds from all their buns tomorrow, it would be national news and they would absolutely lose sales as people switched to Burger King which would probably launch a national advertising campaign about how they've still got sesame seeds unlike a certain cheapskate competitor that seems to have forgotten what makes a burger complete.
A lot of our popular consumer products and foods have reached a kind of "steady state" because they're what people like at the right price point and there isn't much innovation to be had on a yearly basis. There isn't a tastier version of Coca-Cola left to be made. But you're interpreting this as "no competition at the margin" which is completely false. The steady state is maintained because of competition. The moment a company cuts quality to deliver something consumers don't want, the competition will eat them alive (remember New Coke?).
And believe me, I've worked at major corporations, not that it matters though. Please don't throw around insults like someone sitting in their bedroom, it's not for HN. But perhaps you have more of an internal corporate view and are missing the broader economic fundamentals here because of that?
I won't bother replying or reading this for obvious reasons. Good luck.
I think that's a pretty good illustration of how cost and value do not naturally align to each other. If a business can find a significant divergence between cost and value, it can take advantage of that gap by calling it profit.
- redesigning Google logo
- buying a failing social network
Pretty easy to build I would think.
This reminds me of Microsoft's increased injection of ads into Windows 11. I'm curious if/when market dynamics will limit the extent to which Microsoft/Google do this.
Just on my way to listen to MY mp3s.
Sure there are. $5/month gets you email/contacts/calendar hosting at Fastmail (and several other similar alternatives). Linux desktops are healthier than ever and have no ads. (Including plenty of music players for playing your own MP3s!) There are countless Fediverse instances that won't advertise at you... there are plenty of options if you look beyond the big players.
Now, for phone OSes, your choices are more limited. GrapheneOS with F-Droid is alright for now, though I'd love to see mobile Linux get more usable again.
Go to the Music section and you'll see a toggle labeled "Show Apple Music".
Market dynamics in this case is just good ol' market failure. Google can 10x the number of pre-roll ads on Youtube, and lose maybe 1% of their audience. Where's every going to go, Peertube? Vimeo? Dailymotion?
Other Social Networks have to bring a better Search Experience and Long Duration video. Then Youtube can easily have a challenger.
Also, showing too many pre-roll ads might reduce the ROI on Ads for the advertiser. I believe an Ad won't convert as good if it's part of a series of Ads.
Search Ads are less effective than before.
Meta, TikTok etc are way better for many small businesses than Google Search.
They might think that adding more places to show Ads is the solution, I believe it will be better if they check how effective their Search Ads are for their customers.
They luckily have Youtube Ads, for now.
I forgot Gmail has ads since I block them, but I never would have believed in 2006 that Gmail would one day look like these screenshots. Horrible.
So I guess that's a good thing - the fact I'm using Fastmail and not Gmail anymore just mainly disappeared from my consciousness.
1: No ads, ever
2: No reason to sell my data. They already have income, and if users found out they were selling data, they'd quickly bail from it (At least with the service I use, which is aimed more at users with privacy concerns), which would ruin their steady revenue.
3: Actually a reason to IMPROVE the product, because again, users will leave if the competition is better.
Plus, it's not that bad price-wise. I think it comes out to $3 a month for what I do with a yearly sub.
Part of why I pushed myself to move away from Gmail was I was still using the @gmail address occasionally.
Luckily, I'd been using my own domains for a long time for most emails, so it's been a pretty easy transition - I still have Fastmail poll Gmail for emails to make sure I see the ones that still go to @gmail.
I say that as a techie with his own domain.
And you can be I own the domain for the new email. Not going to make that mistake again.
A site that first try to trick me into letting them sell my data for ads, then displays up to 8 ads at the same time on a screen (there are more if I scroll), then wants to install a constant advertising script into my computer (allow notifications popup) and when I wanted just to close this thing it advertised me their newsletter.
And they have courage to reproach others for adding advertisements to their product, lol
Ads eventually circumvented my network-level ad blocking and DNS. I'd see an ad every once in a while on YouTube. Sometimes ads would play after watching videos. Then ads would play before casted videos. Then videos would get interrupted to show ads on the Chromecast. Then videos would be interrupted multiple times per video. Then ads would play between videos. On top of all of that, they're playing multiple ads per ad break now.
I thought that was bad, but then I saw what kinds of ads my friends and family were seeing on YouTube via their streaming devices.
Google learned that my friend would watch YouTube videos at night to go to sleep. So how does Google exploit that situation for maximum ad revenue? The YouTube app will show 30+ minute ads at night, one after the other, since they'll likely be asleep as they play. The app knows that they won't skip those absurdly long ads.
YouTube is almost unusable nowadays.
But I realized I watch more docs on YouTube than any other streaming video platform. More than Netflix, more than Prime, more than Disney+, more than HBO.
So I cancelled Netflix and Disney+ and now just keep HBO and Prime. I don't love Prime but I still like the Prime delivery.
So whatever, makes sense. I consume YouTube the most. Might as well not make my life hell and suffer through adds.
I have noticed that my recommendations seem to be getting worse lately, but unsure if that's a flaw in the algorithm or because I've spent years draining the backlogs of the channels I follow.
On Android, I'd just use Newpipe[0] which I absolutely loved; they kept up with Youtube's breaking changes (usually a day-of debug build until the fix reached the main release), and it was such a nice and out of the way music player with everything you could want. (Adhoc playlists, great functionality for queue next/queue, really intuitive UI, backgrounding, etc)
On iOS, I wasn't really able to find an equivalent besides side-loading modified Youtube.app clients to enable the basic features I'd want (all of which are locked behind premium normally). Even with the premium features unlocked, the Youtube app really doesn't behave like an iOS app should, and it's significantly worse than Newpipe in my opinion.
So I'm just curious what about Premium is worth it for you and what it brings that justifies being a subscription. If the answer is just "it's the only option", I get it, can't really argue with that, but really hoping there's something I'm missing that makes Youtube Premium more palatable.
It allows me to pay for a service that I use and I know costs money to run - for a reasonable fee (although it just went up in price and is less reasonable now), given how many hours our family watches per month on YouTube.
Creators still get paid from YouTube premium views, and some creators see better revenue from that than from YouTube ads. I like supporting the creators I watch. I refuse to participate in regular ads. Sponsored segments are (barely) tolerable and skippable.
I run an ad blocker and try to provide compensation to the sources I consume regularly. Patreon, news subscriptions, YouTube premium, etc. So just blocking ads through Newspipe or similar but still consuming a lot of video - doesn't feel right to me.
As a user of a piece of software, it's very difficult to even use the darn thing :) Finding new channels is really tough even when logged in and letting the algorithm work for awhile. So for me it fails to bring me new stuff to check out, it fails as an application in terms of usability and features, and for the few channels I am willing to follow, I'm a lot more comfortable just contributing on Patreon.
That basically leaves Youtube with the server costs, and yeah, that's not something to scoff at and it's not something I expect Alphabet to pony up for.
But for me, the terms and conditions for all that isn't worth paying a subscription to Youtube for; the app barely keeps feature parity with contemporary apps, Youtube itself is pretty poor at getting me new stuff to watch, etc. I'd really rather just go back to smaller, multiple platforms and iTunes like purchasing.
I've just personally crossed a threshold where I can't avoid the fact I use enough of it that I should be paying for it. I'd like to think I'd just boycott it entirely if I decided it was too expensive. Not sure if that'd be true in practice. I'd definitely boycott the official app, though - the experience is pretty bad.
Historically, I've avoided using a non-official app due to some questionable distribution methods for some of them, and due to not wanting to anger Google into shutting my account off for non-supported access. The latter is why I no longer use Google search nor Gmail anymore.
Just because I technically could get something equivalent for free, doesn’t mean I necessarily want to.
I’m fortunate enough that the monthly subscription isn’t exactly breaking the bank, so it’s a good way to support the content I enjoy, and is more realistic and affordable than subscribing to dozens of Patreons.
I also do the majority of my viewing on my TV via Apple TV (and previously the built in TV apps), so the options for third party alternatives are very limited even if the above were not the case.
Ads aren't the only problem. The YouTube recommendation algorithm works a little too well. I'll watch one video on a topic and then YouTube thinks I'm in love with it and floods my feed with 100 other related videos. It's terrible for discovering new content.
Is that really still a thing? If my email app was showing me ads I'd obviously switch and/or start paying for it.
https://support.google.com/mail/answer/3094499?hl=en&co=GENI...
Should be the same for tutanota or others, don’t know about migration script (easy switch) of others, though. For me it worked without any hiccups.
Was this written by AI? No sources, no screenshots.
If you pay for Gmail (Google Workspaces, previously known as G-Suite) then they do not serve ads.
When using any POP/IMAP client, you won't get ads as the POP/IMAP protocol has no provisioning for it. Unless Google injects the ad into the email body (which is near impossible to do reliably) they cannot show ads even if they want to.
No ads, no data-scraping and I even have business support in case something doesn't work.
To me, the only advantage to Gmail is integration with the Google ecosystem, especially for Android users, but purely for email, it seems to have stagnated, but not in a good way like wine, compared to the old HTML days of 2005 when it blew everything out of the water.
How Gmail still not have tabs is bewildering to me.
Self-hosting has the added advantage of offering "unlimited" storage space, as many addresses using whatever creative schemes you want - I give specific addresses to all commercial/government/organisational institutions I communicate with which allows me to spot who abuses or leaks addresses and makes it possible to block those and only those addresses. SMTP and IMAP have their warts but they remain among the few well-specified open protocols which enable communication with anyone who can follow the standards. Any "successor" to these better be just as open, well-specified and preferably backwards-compatible with SMTP or it probably won't fly.
Not unless you can tie the use of an email provider to a protected characteristic (race, gender, etc.)
(though that one at least I legitimately chide people for using, because I have family members whose devices got infected because juno failed to filter out malicious emails appearing to come from personal contacts).
I still use yahoo.
But somewhere someplace, I cannot trust them on security anymore. I know of a few vulnerabilities that I cannot explain. And so my emails will remain for insecure purposes.
Because every time I read about yahoo on HN it seems to be only negative opinions and in general people look funny at you when they see you with an yahoo email address instead of a Gmail one which has become the norm for average joe consumers.
I mean I know they're not a sexy company anymore and they didn't have a competent CEO but their e-mail offering still slaps IMO.
I use it mostly for non-critical activates like signing up to websites and online shopping.
That's the only problem I have after migrating to Fastmail: it takes serious effort to make people over the phone understand that I have an email in a different domain. I can spell it letter by letter, but people often still can't figure just where this funny thing I'm dictating should be put. There's a problem with @ sign, too - somehow, people tend to forget it exists. Well, it exists to separate user from domain, and since they don't know the domain part exists, they don't need to know about the separator I guess.
TLDR: if not on GMail, you need to make a habit of sending the address in an SMS, forgo all hopes of giving it to someone over the phone.
When two people per year are surprised or upset that I didn’t see their e-mail, I tell them just to call me and leave it for the tape machine if I miss them.
E-mail has some important uses still, but come on… when was the last time you wrote a virtual letter to your friend?
Another example. We all have to print documents pretty much once a year these days. So I fix my printer once a year. The office worker on the other end of the (ugh) phone is always so confused that I am not dealing with reams of paper every week.
I call it progress.
I have mostly been off search for a while. Gmail is the stickiest thing by far.
enshittification indeed.
BTW: it's very hard running a long-term study about the ad load. It is too noisy. And you can read whatever you want to read in such studies.
I've been happy with Protonmail, they don't charge a prohibitive amount. Kagi is also ok. I wish there was a good alternative to YouTube, but sadly basically every YouTube competitor (e.g. Odysee, Bitchute) seems to just become a dumping ground for a bunch of neo-Nazi idiots, but at least YouTube does have YouTube premium, and I can skip through the sponsored ExpressVPN and Raycon ads.
It really is a shame
I just see Facebook somewhere. Ads everywhere even when people leaving it.
[1] Old Slow AIs, aka "companies". http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2019/12/artifici...
It's nigh-necessary for communicating with government and participating in the economy—USPS ought to do email.
It probably wouldn't help you escape email ads though, the USPS is heavily funded by bulk mail.
Then again, they allow mail that fraudulently tries to appear "official" or important when it's just an ad (and sometimes an outright scam!) so all that would have to be legislated to ensure it happens, I suppose. Would love to see "mail system reform" on a party platform, but I guess that doesn't get the voters out.
I disagree, based on accounts by librarians that they're becoming tech support of last resort for various unaccountable and uncaring email providers that the most vulnerable in society are trying to use just to get by, causing basically everyone involved to be miserable and worse-off than they might be in a better-functioning system.
I don't think government should be the only provider (and I don't think I even implied that?) but do think that if one of the main ways of interacting with vital government and private-sector services is going to be email—and it is—then it makes a lot of sense for the USPS to provide a viable option for that, for basically the same reason that it makes sense to have a USPS at all.