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Comment by dm8 | Hacker News Reader

Okay. So this style of advertising is known as "native/integrated advertising". As someone who runs a startup doing the same, I have few things:

1. Google has been doing this for years. It was known as "adwords". It's multi-billion dollars tool that gave birth to SEM.

2. It is limited to promotions tab. Promotions tab is where users go to check their promotional emails. I doubt Gmail will move them to real inbox. In fact, they will be foolish to do so. It's pretty smart move.

3. It is clearly marked as an ad with yellow background. So user is clearly informed about advertisement.

It's understandable that users are freaking out a little. But c'mon gmail has been doing ads in their inbox for a while. Email is extremely personal medium and they will be foolish to move ads from promotions tab to inbox tab. Google has lot of smart folks on their teams so we can trust them for the same.

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I have a few things too:

1. This new "feature" is basically automated filters. Most folks who've used gmail for years have at least some filters set up. Google didn't say anything about throwing ads in the promotions tab, so this is a little...strange.

2. Slippery slope. How long until this populates the main inbox tab? I bet google could even charge differently depending on which tab you want your ads to show up in.

3. XMPP Federation. Google Reader. Google Wave. How long will it be until Gmail is either axed or full of so many ads that it's unusable?

4. Does Adblock / NoScript block these? Can it?

5. The history of Gmail was that it was a next-generation email service and started as an invite only club. Now, every email provider under the sun gives similar features, and gmail hasn't changed much. Personally I think that this is a good thing, it shows that the service is stable and the ideas were correct. But people at Google might think otherwise and might want to try to "innovate" more. Sooo... ads.

1. I agree, Google must do something to inform users about these auto categorizations

2. I doubt they will populate primary inboxes with ads. They created promotions tab for that so they must've thought about it long and hard. Believe me, when people like me who work in ads businesses think about introducing new ads/formats, we worry about lot of things. Ads are not about making money. Ads are about ensuring users find them useful, brands also demand that. Lastly, even if I run ad related business, I'm an average user too, I have my family who have no clue about how digital advertising works. So whatever decisions I make is important for me, my family and my users given it's implications.

3. Google axed some of the products you mentioned cause they were not sustainable for them. I doubt that will be the case for Gmail. It's most popular web-mail service.

4. No they can't as far as my knowledge goes. But someone might figure out a way to block them.

5. I was part of invite only club in 2004. And I also miss some of the cutting-edge innovations that gmail brought e.g. storage, speed, agility etc. I personally find these auto categorizations to be extremely useful. It has cleaned up my cluttered inbox. And ads are also part of it but their impact is minimal.

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