Gmail is showing ads in the middle of the inbox

https://9to5google.com/2023/05/05/gmail-ads-increase-2023/

by microflash • 3 years ago

131 170 3 years ago

microflash• 3 years ago

Last time I used Gmail app, it was showing multiple ads on the top. Now, it seems we are getting even more ads scattered throughout (since a few on the top were clearly not enough). With this pace, that day is not far when people will be complaining about not being able to find mails in their Gmail inbox.

Thankfully, this misery can be easily avoided by using alternatives such as K9 and FairEmail.

esotericimpl• 3 years ago

Same idea as here: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

Gmail is being Enshittified.

CommieBobDole• 3 years ago

Honestly, it's amazing how quickly Google got to the point where their corporate culture is so ossified that they can't build or maintain anything successful anymore and are resorting to extracting the tiniest bits of revenue no matter the reputational cost. Especially considering that this decline has been going on for a while.

Most big successful companies blow up and then spend decades on a plateau before they start the long, inevitable decline - it seems like Google just skipped that part.

coldpie4• 3 years ago

I'm always baffled when I see people using a desktop web browser without an ad blocker. We have the technology to fix this, folks! It takes like two clicks! Use it!

https://ublockorigin.com/

ed25519FUUU• 3 years ago

Adblocking is one of the primary reasons I will always use the mobile site over the app. Why cede over navigation controls and privacy to an app when I can keep it all sandboxed in a familiar and (adblocked) place?

CoastalCoder• 3 years ago

Any suggestions for ad blocking on mobile?

I've been using Chrome on Android, which is pretty much the experience you'd imagine (both pros and cons).

bcrl6• 3 years ago

Some of us believe that content creators should get paid. It's a pity that ads are the lowest friction method easily available to the general public to accomplish this.

ravenstine4• 3 years ago

Creators can get paid in other ways. It's their choice to rely on something people both (rightfully) hate and are willing to block for revenue.

If a creator must make a living by throwing State Farm ads in front of me again and again, I can't say I have much sympathy.

coldpie4• 3 years ago

I spend over $100/mo on Patreon. There are other options. IMO online ad-based business models are one of the biggest evils of the current age. Why does social media push the most outrage-bait content? Ads. Why is Google filled with SEO spam? Ads. Why can't non-ad business models get a foot in the door? Ads. We need to destroy online advertising as a viable business model. Using an ad blocker is the ethical choice.

drumhead• 3 years ago

Charge consumers then. If it's good enough they'll pay for it.

burkaman2• 3 years ago

Me too, but if someone ambushes me on the street and ties a bracelet around my wrist, I'm not going to pay them for that or keep wearing it. That's not an acceptable way to get paid for content you created. Make an offer and get consent.

mynameisvlad2• 3 years ago

I'm sure Google is crying over the lost cents of revenue.

Aside from the other comments mentioning better ways to support them, yoy can allowlist content crwators you want to see ads from, or alternately just use the extension on certain sites like Gmail.

It's not an all or nothing proposition.

AlexandrB• 3 years ago

I sympathize, I really do. Back when privacy respecting ad networks like The Deck were still around I kept them unblocked. But until ad networks stop acting like creepy stalkers and allow me to opt out of tracking it's not going to happen.

hedora4• 3 years ago

Wait. If I send you an email, and Google shows you ads for testostropiod-max-coq10, then I get paid for the content I just created?!?

Where do I pick up my check?

Seriously though: Just pay the content creators directly.

If using patreon/etc is too hard, subscribe to apple news+ (the global market leader in this space).

If that is too click-baity, then set up a competitor that doesn’t objectively suck.

capableweb4• 3 years ago

You can whitelist specific sites if you feel like supporting them that way. Then you get the best of the two worlds: no ads anywhere except on the sites where you want to support the content creators.

0zemp2c3• 3 years ago

Some of us believe that content creators should get paid

do you really think ad money flows to creators?

AndrewKemendo2• 3 years ago

What percentage of online advertising revenue actually lands with content creators?

My gut feeling here is that it’s way less than 50% (corporations, not indie creators spend the most on ads) which would mean on average you are looking at or engaging with a corporation not an indie creator

DoreenMichele3• 3 years ago

I removed ads from my blogs years ago.

If you are reviewing stereo equipment or something like that, ads can make sense for all parties -- content creator, advertisers and audience. But for a lot of things, if you want your creative content to have real value, ads make no sense.

My most successful site is a resource for homeless Americans. They have little to no money to spend. Having ads on the site strikes me as tantamount to fraud because my audience can't reasonably be expected to buy enough stuff to make the ads make business sense for the advertisers.

lynx23• 3 years ago

Those of "us" which think content creators should be paid buy music on BandCamp, donate to open source projects, follow folks on Patreon, or whatever. I submit nobody is actually consuming ads voluntarily. Its like stockholm syndrome. After a while, you find rationalisations for the weirdest shit.

nimih2• 3 years ago

Which content creator, specifically, is getting paid when I see an ad while trying to find a package tracking notification in my email inbox?

bedast3• 3 years ago

Sometimes it's not just about getting rid of an annoyance. I've stuck to my guns with ad blocking to protect myself from malicious ad content. In terms of content creators getting paid, I pay for a Youtube Premium subscription to help with that (which, it's my understanding content creators get paid MORE by Youtube Premium views than ad supported views).

princevegeta89• 3 years ago

The problem is the ads were abused to the point of users being completely pissed by how misleading, intruding, and annoying and network intensive they have become.

I remember not using adblockers a long long time ago to keep supporting content creators - but once I saw the aggressive ad "shove-in-your-face" trend rising up, I could no longer go without an adblocker

amelius3• 3 years ago

Some of us believe that content creators should get paid. It's a pity that ads are the lowest friction method easily available to the general public to accomplish this.

It's also a pity that ads cause people to buy even more stuff, causing needless environmental harm.

I have no sympathy for ads as a monetization model.

amelius3• 3 years ago

Because ads are in your face, it's like advertisers having their hands already in your wallet.

antisthenes• 3 years ago

I support small independent content creators.

What I don't support is Pichay's $220 million comp package at the cost of showing ads in the middle of my main productivity tool.

If they want to sabotage one of their products in this way - then I have no problem shouting from the rooftops for everyone to ditch google and adblock everything with impunity.

account427• 3 years ago

Content creators mostly don't get paid in the ad-supported model. Only a few do, and even they only get scraps left over after the middlemen take their cut.

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

It looked from the screenshot in the article that they're inserting ads that look like regular messages — similar to how HN puts ads in the feed which look like regular posts. I'm not sure uBlock would catch those, though I both run uBlock and have never seen these ads, so maybe it does.

coldpie4• 3 years ago

It does.

account427• 3 years ago

Thankfully consumer protections are only mosly nonexistent and advertisers still have to mark their crap as ads. They try to make that marker as invisible as they can get away with and obfuscate it from ad blockers but it still has to be there.

NegativeLatency• 3 years ago

Been using 1Blocker on iOS in combination with my home adguard dns server

davidmurphy• 3 years ago

I see ad blockers as theft, and highly unethical. I strongly oppose them.

rcme2• 3 years ago

I see forced ad viewing as theft of attention. I see online trackers as truly insidious behavior.

bloqs• 3 years ago

You view advertisers right to display to your eyes and ears as absolute?

LeifCarrotson• 3 years ago

I see advertisements as theft of my attention, and highly unethical. I strongly oppose them.

rektide• 3 years ago

One of those really great & powerful things about webapps being built on the DOM. The DOM is flexible & malleable & we can sculpt our own experience.

It's a broadly pro-user capability that native apps categorically lack. That humanity can actually participate in & have say on the computing medium is an incredible wonder. One, alas, that many people see as a weakness!!

wooque• 3 years ago

I'm baffled people are still using Gmail

BaseballPhysics• 3 years ago

Or pay a few bucks a month for an email service that has an aligned set of incentives.

PaulDavisThe1st2• 3 years ago

Then add some version of the Steven Black /etc/hosts blacklist, and you're golden. The nefarious web, or most of it, simply disappears to almost anything running on your computer.

magoghm• 3 years ago

I have been using Gmail since 2004 and I haven't ever seen a single ad there.

Edit: I just checked and it seems that the ad blocker might be blocking them. What's interesting is that I did not install that ad blocker myself, and I'm using Chrome. Does Chrome come by default with an ad blocker that blocks the ads in Gmail?

jeffbee4• 3 years ago

You won't see them if you disable the tabbed inbox, which I recommend anyway because the classification of threads into tabs is surprising and inconsistent.

0zemp2c3• 3 years ago

...and adds no value even when it works, just adds one more step

zeven72• 3 years ago

Chrome does not come with an ad blocker.

rc_mob• 3 years ago

Damn. I do not want to migrate off gmail, but this is going to force me.

k__3• 3 years ago

I switched to Proton two years ago and I'm pretty happy.

It helped to get a custom domain before the switch. That way, I could stay on Gmail while switching all accounts to my new domain and later just transfer the domain from Gmail to Proton.

rkachowski• 3 years ago

The only thing stopping me from full proton is the clunky calendar integration.

The last time I checked there was no way to get calendar support on android / ios / macos like with gcal. There's a custom calendar app but it lacks the usability of an iCal integration

r3trohack3r• 3 years ago

I did the inverse. I migrated to protonmail and setup email forwarding from GMail to proton. Then, every time I received an email that was forwarded, I’d go in and update that vendor or unsubscribe. After a few months, the only thing still coming from GMail was spam and I shut off the forwarder. Basically a classic strangulation strategy used by service migrations.

I did setup a private domain, but just for configuring a catch-all. Now each vendor gets their own email address. Originally did it to cut down on spam and track where it was coming from. But it turns out my personal email doesn’t get much spam. My gmail accounts get hammered with it. Seems like gmail has a unique spam problem.

markdoubleyou• 3 years ago

Gmail supports IMAP, right? Would changing to a different desktop/mobile client make the ads go away?

bentley• 3 years ago

No ads in Thunderbird, K‐9 Mail, or any of the other mainstream open‐source IMAP clients I’m aware of.

f6v• 3 years ago

Haven’t seen ads in Mail on iOS. It was hard to move at first, but at least I’m not harassed with prompts to download chrome anymore.

hammyhavoc8• 3 years ago

For now. Wouldn't surprise me if Google forces API only at some point.

bthrn• 3 years ago

As annoying as this is, I was mildly amused at the irony that this article itself has ads shoved between paragraphs.

hammyhavoc8• 3 years ago

Well, one is a blog/news site, the other is an email client. That's pretty different.

isanjay2• 3 years ago

One needs terabytes of storage and hundreds of servers and other other needs few megabytes of storage and relatively miniscule server.

marginalia_nu• 3 years ago

It's kinda weird. I remember switching to gmail because it had working spam blocking. It was basically all emails.

Nowadays my gmail inbox is virtually only advertisement. Advertisement from google, and various form of spam emails, mostly in the form of newsletters I've never signed up for.

Meanwhile my off-gmail inbox, an email address I have literally in my hacker news profile info as well as printed in plain text on my website, doesn't get a fraction of the spam.

1over137• 3 years ago

Nowadays my gmail inbox is virtually only advertisement.

It's almost as if Google is an advertisements company. :)

hammyhavoc8• 3 years ago

IMO, it's a scaling issue. Filtering email is relatively expensive, it's cheaper to just let a good chunk of it through, especially if the service isn't necessarily making tons of money with every user given how many people block ads by default.

vxNsr• 3 years ago

The next step is for gmail to disable other clients to force you to use theirs so you can’t get away from the ads.

jeffbee4• 3 years ago

"I went to the Promotions tab and saw ads" is a hell of a take.

passwordoops• 3 years ago

That's not what the article is saying at all. They mention Promotions always had ads (expected), but now they're showing up in Updates, and in the middle of the list to boot, which never had ads before.

In fact, the main usefulness of the Tabs for me has always been the filtering of crap to Promotions and no ads in the other tabs

zac23or• 3 years ago

I don't understand this kind of rant. Google's revenue comes from ads. Google will place ads on all products wherever possible. If Google doesn't put it up, the shareholders will ask to put it up.

Oh, the article has too many ads.

nottorp2• 3 years ago

So when are they disabling 3rd party IMAP clients?

In the name of security of course!

fsflover• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20300008

everybodyknows• 3 years ago

2019.

trabant002• 3 years ago

Basic Fastmail is 3$/month. My com domain is ~12$/year. That's 50$/year for one of, if not the most important internet service tied to your identity.

Sorry to put it this bluntly but pay up or shut up and take it. Or do the work and host it yourself. Or make friends with some IT people and have them host it as a favor. Or whatever. You are not entitled to both free and good services. Google has to make money, what a surprise.

Whenever there's talk about privacy, support, ads, etc about a product or service here everybody's saying that they would pay for the clean thing. Well for email you absolutely can.

hammyhavoc8• 3 years ago

Name an Android email client that doesn't have ads, isn't hot garbage in UI or UX, and has features like email templates.

trabant002• 3 years ago

Fastmail does not have ads, has good ui and ux.

I don't even know what email templates are. But name a HN user that is smarter than me, his name begins with trab and ends in nt00.

vgeek• 3 years ago

FairEmail is probably the best. K9 is more hit or miss, but is usable.

Marsymars2• 3 years ago

Outlook? (Assuming an Office 365 sub.)

LopovJack• 3 years ago

Fairmail and K9.

Marsymars2• 3 years ago

TBF I have both a gmail account and a paid-for email account that I use extensively. I haven't migrated everything away from gmail primarily because of inertia - recreating all my workflows outside of gmail is probably a couple solid weekends of effort, which is way more than $50 worth of my time, and as I don't use the gmail web interface (or the gmail apps), I never see ads anyway.

zoul• 3 years ago

I have migrated to https://www.fastmail.com/, it was quite painless. Happy to pay for it, happy to have email on my own domain. Can recommend. (No affiliation, just a happy user.)

AndrewKemendo2• 3 years ago

This might be the endorsement that finally gets me to move to fm

0zemp2c3• 3 years ago

....and you can forward your gmail to your fastmail account, and have fastmail respond using the right address

tledakis• 3 years ago

another happy user here for many years. It is worth it

rcme2• 3 years ago

Does their iOS app work well?

mthoms2• 3 years ago

It's great IMO.

mthoms2• 3 years ago

Ditto here. Fastmail is worth every penny. The product is better and they actually have support.

dogleash• 3 years ago

Yup. Fastmail is very no-hassle email experience.

I don't even how they stack up to the competition, but they're good enough that I'm much happier to just pay them $50/year than go out and comparison shop for email providers.

iinnPP• 3 years ago

I am also an extremely happy ex-paid-Gmail user that is now paying Fastmail for a far superior experience in Email.

One benefit has been the ease in which I can handle spam and undesirables. Everything is now coming to one inbox and anything that is interrupting me without being useful is being unsubscribed to, or having the one-off email removed.

What a relief it has been. Thank you Fastmail!

mmh00002• 3 years ago

I self-hosted my own email for about 15 years, but, managing an email server, even with just a single user, requires an insane amount of dedication and time. It got to the point where I just didn't want to deal with it (IP rep, gmail, outlook, spam, l33t h4x0rs, backscatter, joe jobs, any of it) anymore.

I looked at a few different hosted email options and settled on Fastmail. I'm now hosting all 12 of my domains with catch-all and redirects. I prepaid for something like 3 years. And it's so great... After initial setup, I've had to do zero admin. And the initial setup was pretty easy, they imported all my email from my email server, I moved all my contacts from iCloud, and linked in my iCloud calendars.

I'm not getting paid for this, I know I sound like an Ad, but I'm not. I'm just incredibly happy and relieved. Also, a shout-out to their support, before giving them any money I harassed them with a bunch of questions and they were super responsive.

toomuchtodo• 3 years ago

FastMail is life <3 simple, consistent, affordable. Will pay them till death.

SuperCuber• 3 years ago

another enthusiastic +1 comment here.

Moved to them from gmail, set up *@firstnamelastname.com and the ability to send and receive emails from my old gmail, then moved all my accounts over (pretty easy if you have a password manager)

Works amazingly :)

mhb• 3 years ago

So, free service needs way to pay for infrastructure to provide service? Knock me over with a feather.

karaterobot2• 3 years ago

That doesn't quite explain it for me. Recall that they haven't shown these ads for the last 19 years. They were certainly analyzing your data and using that information the whole time, likely to improve their ads business. But until recently, that was enough, and now it's not. That is what is interesting.

pavlov2• 3 years ago

Gmail has always been an ad vehicle first and foremost.

When it launched in 2004, Google was reading all your emails so they could target ads. This was entirely public knowledge and there was debate about whether it’s a good idea to give a tech company that kind of access, but hey, they promised to Do No Evil and had a colorful logo so it was all fine.

They finally stopped the practice 13 years later [1], but it shouldn’t be a surprise that Gmail’s product design is driven by the needs of ad display and data collection.

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/4041720/heres-why-it-took-gmail-...

jeffbee4• 3 years ago

Gmail has always been an ad vehicle first and foremost.

I don't think that's really true. The original point of gmail was to get users to log in, so they would get better search quality. Before gmail there was no reason to log in to Google at all.

pavlov2• 3 years ago

Is the point of getting users to log in to give them better search results or better targeted ads? My impression is that the two have always gone hand in hand at Google.

chankstein382• 3 years ago

I know this isn't necessarily relevant but as an old person when I saw your >2004 and then >13 years later my brain laughed like "ahaha no way it's been 13+ years since 2004" Nope. Brain. Sorry. It's been 19 :( lol

6gvONxR4sf7o• 3 years ago

I really hope this trend doesn’t end with ads in my text messages too. It’s sad to see an email service that partly became popular because they had such a great spam filter, now injecting spam.

planede• 3 years ago

Uh, so for how long can I keep accessing my inbox through IMAP?

bedast3• 3 years ago

I'm frequently reminding people that Google is not an email provider nor a search engine nor really anything else it pretends to be, but that it's a data harvesting and ad company.

Thankfully I've been becoming less reliant on my gmail inbox. But also, it appears my various efforts for blocking malicious content may be blocking these ads because I don't see them on my home network.

hammyhavoc8• 3 years ago

What are you relying on in place of Gmail? It's never been the email service itself I've liked, it's the web app and Android app, I use the External Accounts feature to drag in all email accounts into one place.

bedast3• 3 years ago

I have my own domain attached to icloud mail at the moment. But primarily, I have my own domain and can move it to wherever I need it. Icloud mail isn't the best thing in the world, still, but it's more cost efficient than trying to run it on a personal O365 or some other service for now. I don't really have need for the enhanced security/privacy of some of the other providers available, at least for now, but having my own domain means migrating to them later, should I need it, shouldn't be difficult.

I will note the icloud mail web interface is utter garbage.

hammyhavoc8• 3 years ago

This is making me want to switch to Nextcloud Mail's web app. I wish there was a companion Android app to go with it.

ir77• 3 years ago

gmail discouraged me from using it a few years back when they insisted on scanning my emails for "purchases" and then would log these items somewhere in my history graph. interestingly enough, you could delete almost all history but the purchase history. what especially rubbed me the wrong way that it would list some medicine on there, and even though i didn't even purchase it through google they insisted on keeping that record in there permanently at their discretion.

i immediately moved over all 10+ of history to a new provider, set up an OOO and an auto forward to the new email. all "real" people would read the OOO and write to the new email, so now whatever's in gmail is a bot infested ad stuff.

diimdeep• 3 years ago

I recommend to use Mimestream app https://mimestream.com for gmail, until you can migrate off gmail and Google

JohnFen5• 3 years ago

I would be willing to tolerate ads if I could be sure they didn't come with tracking.

minusf• 3 years ago

do ads pay just by looking at them? one needs to click on them and generate at least a lead if not a conversion, no?

--an adblock user since adblocking is a thing and bandcamp/patreon user

xnx• 3 years ago

Yes. Many ads are cost per impression.

endigma• 3 years ago

Wow! Google saves me so much time. I don't even have to subscribe myself to junkmail lists anymore!

fjni• 3 years ago

If you're ok with html-only, enjoy a throwback: https://mail.google.com/mail?ui=html

I'm not sure the ads would be in that UI.

WirelessGigabit• 3 years ago

It used to be clearly separated what ads were and what not.

On Outlook they show up as an email. On top.

Same with Reddit. The advertisements keep on becoming less and less obvious.

DuckDuckGo on my iPhone has a FULL page of advertisements when I click 'Products'. And they look exactly the same. There's only a header.

Advertisements should be extremely explicitly marked.

account427• 3 years ago

Agreed, the advertising industry has been tring to skirt around consumer protection laws and is long due a hard slap through their face.

sammyo• 3 years ago

Throw'm a bone. Click on gmail ads, keep gmail alive as long as possible. Yes issues, yes privacy, yes a lot, but gmail is one of the best things on the internet. So good at spam, especially the real nasties. Worth a few clicks.

Brian_K_White• 3 years ago

Thunderbird. K9. Come on.

tucosan• 3 years ago

I find it weird that people on HN complain about ads in Gmail. If you're not paying for a service, someone else has to cover the costs you generate by using the service.

A Google Workspace subscription is not expensive. You can run it behind your own TLD, and you won't see any ads.

Gmail is showing ads in the middle of the inbox

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