Why would anyone use this over Proton Mail or the gazillion alternatives if it treats people like shit.
This is why, if you need to use gmail, you never use the official app. Just use a different client, anf you at least bypass this specific bullshit
Gmail has had ads for at least a decade.
Not saying its new. Just was surprised. They probably don’t make much from it. Why put it in for a couple pennies (on a corporate level). I didn’t think they were that greedy. I honestly hadn’t seen this before because I rarely use gmail and have never used the promotions tab.
A couple of pennies time a Billion users is a lot of pennies.
It is probably way less than a penny per user per day.
We learned this from meta didn’t we? A user is worth about $15 a month?
I don’t even know if this is true, but I’d love to know more.
Maybe we’re worth £4 a month, but they just decided to pull a higher price out of their ass to dissuade everyone from paying.
I suspect the small amount of people who decide to pay will cost more in infrastructure, and causes more headaches to meta anyway.
No we didn’t. We learned they were required to offer an ‘ad tracking free’ experience and that they priced it at $15/month. As that experience only exists as a result of a law suit - we have no idea what a user is worth.
Because they were limited by what they could charge to ‘sounds reasonable’ and ‘unlikely to cause further lawsuits’
They’ve only recently started making the ads look like unread emails to try to trick you into clicking them.
Ublock origin
That’s not an option for the mobile app.
Outlook been doing it awhile, so cheap and shitty.
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They’re saying it’s a little late to be shocked. Obviously.
I believe this has been going on for a while now. It’s one of the reasons why I switched over to Proton Mail.
were these not always in gmail?
I’ve never seen them and have been using it for close to 20 years now
They only show up if you use the tabs. And then I think they are only in Promotions.
oh right that’s a cursed function anyways
Yes. They have always been a part of Gmail. Even back when Gmail was invite only they implemented ads (one of my accounts is from 2004).
Yes they’ve always been a thing in the promotions/else tabs, anyone who says they aren’t around simply hasn’t clicked those tabs or registered they existed (in fairness, everything in that tab is generally an ad)
IDK cause I use Adguard DNS and the DDG app. I never see ads anywhere
They have been for years now.
Maybe I’m missing something, but hasn’t this been the case since forever?
I mean, Google is an advertising company. I would be surprised if they didn’t serve ads in their free email service.
Literally since the beginning AFAIK. Although they allegedly stopped scanning e-mails for targeted ad data years back: https://www.pcmag.com/news/google-to-stop-scanning-gmail-messages-to-serve-up-ads
I don’t recall seeing ads in the phone app, however, just the webapp, so perhaps that is new? Which makes some kind of dark sense given less people use computers to do things anymore, and every tech company is trying to pull off increasingly maximum grift over the last few years.
I’ve never in my life seen an ad in Gmail mobile app in-line as though it were something in your inbox. I get really frustrated at the indignance over “ad company does ads and you’re mad” as if there’s not a difference when things get escalated.
It’s under the promotions tab. Been that way for a while. I just don’t use that tab myself so I don’t see it often.
While you are correct, the sheer amount these past few weeks, for me at least, is staggering
They’ve been picking up the density, for sure. I think adblock has also frequently worked on the webUI if you’ve used firefox, i’m not sure if they’ve updated it to get around ublock.
FAANG and the other high-cap tech companies have been cashing in on their market dominance these last few quarters - they’re all getting bad. That’s not a good sign if you’re an average joe; it means you’ll be bombarded with tracking and ads (even more than now) AND I think it’s a bad sign for market stability. People have been predicting another recession for a while, but that signal is getting louder I think.
They started putting ads in the mobile app a while ago. I think I first noticed a couple years ago? I had been using Inbox until that got shut down, then used the web UI for the most part. I’ve tried a few other app options, but the only one I like is $10/mo just for the UI. Not even a full email address, just a UI for Gmail.
I switched to spark when inbox got decomed works well for me. I’m sure they also sell my data but so did google
Lol who the fuck uses the promotions tab?
You are just using Gmail poorly.
Like going to a shopping centre and complaining the stores have ads in front of their stores. There’s legitimate concerns about Google and then there’s just dumb users.
You are just using Gmail.
You accidentally a word.
? What? This makes complete sense…
E. G.: “You are just using Windows” “You are just using Proton Mail” “You are just using xyz”
Why do people upvote this post, without reading comments that say its nothing new?
People like to be angry at Google. I mean, fair game, I dislike them a lot myself. But yeah, it’s voicing “yeah I hate that too”, would be my interpretation.
Gmail has been doing this for yeeeaars
It is insiane to me that Google shows these ads to google one subscribers.
I already pay google hundreds of dollars a year, and have done so for years. then over the last 2 yesr they slowly started rolling out intrusive ads into my mobile Gmail app.
It was the final straw for me. I’ve started slowing migrating my email off Gmail, but my goodness is that ever a slow and painful process.
The only way to disable them is to disable the inbox sorting setting (where it sorts primary, promotional, and social). As it is, it only puts adds in the promotional inbox. The worst thing is, i swear it knows where your mouse is and re sorts your emails so an ad lands right below your mouse, increasing the number of ad clicks and the ad revenue. I’ve had this happen to be multiple times.
If they were really doing this it’d probably be considered fraud.
Clicks need to be real and organic and placing something so a person accidentally clicks it intentionally when they sell the ads would be fraudulent.
But good luck proving it if so.
If you have a Gmail account with promotional emails, go into your promotional inbox and just mouse around a little bit near the top 10 emails. You’ll most likely see it move the ads around
I have the promotional section and actual email from companies are there, but no ads from Google. Maybe it’s not allowed in Canada?
Nice! Maybe so.
Yep, first thing I do whenever I add an account to Gmail is disable inbox sorting — presto, zero ads. This has been going on for years, but if OP just made a new Gmail account for the first time since 2013ish, it could be the first time they’ve seen the ads. Feels bad.
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weel -> well
well
I use protonmail, so I don’t have to see shit like that.
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You haven’t checked your email in how many years?
My wife, at one point, had 10k unread. Some people just don’t read emails they don’t want to read.
Mine’s currently sitting in the 30k region.
I have thousands unread too. But I read the important ones. I at least look at it …sometimes
Its been about 5 months since I last used gmail. I have mostly switched to Proton now.
Do you like it? I gotta get away from Gmail, too.
Its pretty nice. Still intrusive but better than gmail.
