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Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

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Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#181

Post by ydant »

csydas wrote: post #159
deergomoo wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same realisation. At this point, YouTube Premium is probably the subscription I would give up last. Premium is (for now) quite a nice experience, and there is so much nerdy niche content that would never get made commercially, certainly not to the same scale. 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 drain…

Out of curiosity, what does Premium do for you that is a positive? This is an earnest question, as recently my old Android phone died and I got a new iPhone. 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 wan…

(not the person you asked)

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.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#182

Post by OneLeggedCat »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #20

Google now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose. But I guess the economic logic of tying executive compensation to short-term share price simply overwhelmed other considerations. The stock must go up, so revenues must grow, so Google must monetize everything to the maximum…

With only iOS and Android as realistic choices, we genuinely need a more viable (real) Linux phone soon. I have zero faith that Google will let something like GrapheneOS stay in the somewhat usable state that it is in now.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#183

Post by lancesells »

ksec wrote: post #104
ProjectArcturis wrote: post #20

Google now seems deep into the enshittification [1] process. Of all the big tech companies, they seemed the most customer-friendly, the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose. But I guess the economic logic of tying executive compensation to short-term share price simply overwhelmed other considerations. The stock must go up, so revenues must grow, so Google must monetize everything to the maximum…

>the least constrained by the need to optimize their money hose 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 Face…

> They are squeezed left and right by Apple. Google pay Apple per active user as the default search engine.

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?

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#184

Post by skippyboxedhero »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #171
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also raises the question: why does an executive need a consulting company to tell them to put less seeds on the bun? We can accept that "optimize" does not mean more...so...?

Because if they're wrong, it's the consulting company's fault, not the executive's. It is accountability laundering with a budget.

Yes, I asked the question facetiously...I worked in equity research for consumer products companies, and you see this (alarmingly) at good and bad companies.

"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.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#185

Post by 8organicbits »

8organicbits wrote: post #146
robotburrito wrote: post #41

I switched to fastmail.com a few years ago. It's not expensive and so far seems to work quite well for me.

There's a thousand little things that just feel better with fastmail. Loading the Gmail webapp is so slow that I sometimes switch to HTML only. Fastmail: fast. Or if I get a message, I read it via a mobile app notification, and decide to delete it. For Gmail I need to open open the app to find a delete button. Fastmail lets you do that from the notification. I assume Gmail is trying to prioritize archive over delete,…

Just noticed another... I've long considered Gmail's spam filtering to be top notch. Gmail is currently marking messages from google.com/alerts as spam. Google doesn't seem to be paying attention to their products.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#186

Post by thomastjeffery »

DerekBickerton wrote: post #64

I liken this to a sesame seed bun manufacturer. After some experimentation, they realize that shaving roughly 10 sesame seeds from each bun means they save one cent every 100 buns. They continue to sell the buns at the normal price and consumers are none the wiser: After all, who's going to notice 10 sesame seeds missing? But the sesame seed bun manufacturer continues the experiment. They continue to remove the seeds…

I never understood the desire for sesame seeds in the first place. To me, they only add an annoying texture. I would probably pay more for a bun without them, given the opportunity.

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.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#187

Post by 1024core »

charcircuit wrote: post #166
1024core wrote: post #81

Google is run by MBAs now. This is all they know: how to maximize for next quarter's profits, or profits until their RSUs vest.

If you have a holdout group that doesn't get this new ad experience you can test if this change in okay to do long term. It's possible Google mispredicted how much ads were willing to tolerate and have been showing too few ads. Finding the right amount of ads is not optimising for the short term.

Google has been showing Ads for 20+ years. Did they _just now_ discover that users will tolerate more ads?

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.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#188

Post by AlexandrB »

crazygringo wrote: post #135
heavyset_go wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we replace 10% of food with sawdust and people keep buying it, that proves that consumers don't actually want to pay for the real thing and the company that sells it them is doing them a favor.

Yes it would, if that happened. 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 pa…

> 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.

Only if someone actually notices and raises enough of a stink to get other people to notice. This can take a surprisingly long time.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#189

Post by esafak »

charcircuit wrote: post #158
skippyboxedhero wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their financial model is similar to a TV or newspaper. 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 consulta…

>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. 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 o…

When users start leaving, they will not return if changes are reverted because they will have lost their goodwill. It would take more than a reduced ad load for me to go back, for example.

Re: Google appears to be scaling up the ads it shows to Gmail users

#190

Post by b33j0r »

Good thing I mostly use it as my identity and rarely actually use my inbox anymore.

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.

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