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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

#251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Holding the power button no longer turns off your phone, but instead opens voice assistant(?!) 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".

This is configurable behavior: https://seekingtech.com/how-to-make-the-power-button-open-th...

Odd. To the best of my recollection, I've never made that switch. I wonder if it was a prompt upon initial setup way back when? Oh well.

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

#252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was shocked the last time I used Google without an adblocker. The first 4-5 search results were ads. I had to scroll to get to the first actual result. There also seems to be less effort to distinguish ads from regular links. 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".

I find it darkly amusing that the first five ad results are usually the same as the first five “natural” results. Which I click on depends on if if I hate them more than google.

Lol yup! "Should I make this company pay 25 cents to Google?"

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

#253
post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the user has no money his eye balls aren't worth much.

But the user does have money everywhere. India's GDP has long surpassed that of the UK and is quickly approaching that of Germany.

I'm getting old sorry. I didn't know India had such wild growth in internet connections. They went from 4% coverage in 2007 to 48.7% in 2022. woah!

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.

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

#254
post #59

Google's products do seem to be getting progressively shittier, in profound and confusing ways. 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 pa…

>Holding the power button no longer turns off your phone, but instead opens voice assistant(?!) 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".

my 7a and 6a both have this behaviour. It's not super uncommon for google to roll out UI/UX changes chronologically with phone release dates.

... so look forward to that on your next Pixel, I guess.

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

#255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What type of lifestyle does $1 billion make available that is not already affordable with $200 million?

You’ve already missed the point - it doesn’t matter. It’s that peoples’ expectations change. (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)

> 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...

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

#256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're right and the problem is that I can't think of any product from Google for the last 10 years that had the same effect.

Can you think of any product from any company in the past ten years that has made you feel that way?

I can only think of Canva and, of course, the avant-garde AI products: dalle and chatgpt.

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

#257

Have people tried/documented gmail to proton migrations? There is a forwarding functionality that could reduce the migration pain but you never know what kind of can of worms you might get into.

Don’t know what users here think about posting links to one’s own site, but I’ll risk it. I migrated from gmail to proton, and wrote down the steps and experience. [1] 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. [1] https://blog.metters.dev/posts/leaving-gmail-behind/

Thats a really useful overview

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

#258
post #59

Google's products do seem to be getting progressively shittier, in profound and confusing ways. 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 pa…

The products must change because engineers need to do something to show impact and get promotions. Therefore, if the product has reached the maximus of quality, but you need to change it, you end up with zugzwang. Always follow the incentives.

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

#259
post #242
post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I guess now it's time to start looking at different email providers. 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…

I wanted to like Proton, even paid for it, but their apps are _bad_. I switched over to Fastmail after a year.

They are kicking things up a notch recently in my opinion!
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