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Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

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Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#391
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't Google be able to largely mitigate the effects of that if they wanted to by making it so accounts that do not consent to the scanning get smaller mailboxes or do not get spam filtering or something like that? I'd expect that would get most of its users to consent.

Name one free, popular, profitable, large scale service that offers limited capacity on their offering. Very very few. You offer unlimited and you charge for increased value or you monetize with ads. Freemium is mostly dead.

I thought freemium _was_ charging for increased value.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#392
post #82
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ads benefit both you and the other group that they connect you. You finding out about, say, a product you are interested benefits you.

What if you're buddhist?

"Zen does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes while being informed about ten local places to purchase God with next-day delivery."

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one free, popular, profitable, large scale service that offers limited capacity on their offering. Very very few. You offer unlimited and you charge for increased value or you monetize with ads. Freemium is mostly dead.

Google doesn't offer unlimited data storage. 15GB to start and more can be purchased.

The storage offering was way way less than that when everyone here signed up, though it was still vastly greater than anything anyone else offered if memory serves.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#396
post #390

I will never use a enterprise google product unless they have customer support. The customer support team should have humans and not robots.

Enterprise customers have support. It's not as feasible in the consumer space, the volume would be overwhelming.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#397
post #357
post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or they're willing to take a loss on the ads -- which frankly don't make much money -- to go after the far more lucrative corporate emailing/calendaring market. The pricing is $5/$10/$higher per user-month, so walking away from an ads business that may possibly (but I doubt it) be earning hundreds of millions to avoid a cloud over your sales process for the aforementioned multi-billion dollar business seems like a so…

> so walking away from an ads business that may possibly (but I doubt it) be earning hundreds of millions They are making billions from ads, just look their annual report.

Sorry if this is obvious but I went to focus on revenue per user per year.

In other words, how much is it worth to fight the perception that gmail is somehow less secure than office 365 because ads (others have pointed out Google apps for business users don't see ads in their work gmail).

I somehow doubt that gmail ads are worth even remotely close to $120 (12 months * $10 per month) per user per year.

In other news: How much is a user worth per year to Google? Assuming not all users are the same, is there a way to predict his much revenue a user can bring for Google?

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#398
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's like my accountant reading my receipts to create my tax return versus a sleazy salesman sneaking a peek at them to find new ways to sell me stuff.

It's more like your accountant preparing your tax return for free in exchange for aggregating data about your receipts and offering you goods and services you may be interested in.

If its about offering me goods and services that I may be interested in, then ad blocking is a useful feature for both me and the advertiser. If I am not interested in any goods or services then no offering or aggregation is needed.

On the other hand, if its about offering me good and services which other companies want me to become interested in, then we have a different deal going on.

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#399
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be more accurate the article says they stopped scanning for ads that appear inside gmail . Whether they still scan emails in the free gmail for use outside gmail is unknown, but I may be being pedantic...

(disclosure, I work on gmail, although nothing related to ads) I can't find a citation, but I'm fairly confident that that's never been the case. Ad targeting from emails has always been siloed to within gmail. To quote the post: >Consumer Gmail content will not be used or scanned for any ads personalization after this change. That's pretty unequivocal.

Thanks!

Re: Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

#400
post #33

I never understood the argument that some automatic scanning for keywords is like "reading" your mail. By that same logic isn't Gmail's spam filter still "reading" your mail? It is classifying your mail based on content after all...

A frightening theory: it doesn't need to read your email anymore. It has read 10 years worth of your mail, and trained such an accurate model, that any more training data don't make much of a difference.
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