Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads

Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by tzs on Friday June 23, 2017 @05:17PM (#14622878)

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.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by andybak on Friday June 23, 2017 @05:51PM (#14623061)

They could but is it worth it?

I suspect the scanning of emails hasn't yielded the personalization once hoped. And the bad publicity outweighs any future potential.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by Steko on Friday June 23, 2017 @07:25PM (#14623497)

I just think the dollars aren't there: (1) email itself is fading vs text and various social media and (2) 98% of the population reads 98% of their email through the generic mail app on their phones that doesn't display Google's ads anyway.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by late2part on Friday June 23, 2017 @07:33PM (#14623533)

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.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by applecrazy on Friday June 23, 2017 @11:53PM (#14624292)

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

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by late2part on Saturday June 24, 2017 @11:01AM (#14625799)

You're right. And my reponse is weak. But.... That's really meant to discourage those "power" users (like me) from abusing and leaving big stuff in there, I think. It's not meant to encourage most people to pay.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by lostlogin on Saturday June 24, 2017 @03:41AM (#14624767)

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.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by pferde on Sunday June 25, 2017 @09:31AM (#14629888)

Vastly indeed. There were even (one or two) pseudo-filesystems which used a Gmail account as a backend, because, hey, a free gigabyte!

I vaguely remember Google had to put their foot down to disallow such use, that's how popular those filesystems became.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GmailFS

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by late2part on Saturday June 24, 2017 @02:57PM (#14626918)

Agreed. I sort of figure that increase is due to bandwidth inflation and decreasing unit costs.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by aaron_m04 on Saturday June 24, 2017 @03:17AM (#14624720)

I thought freemium _was_ charging for increased value.

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Re:Google Will Stop Reading Your Emails for Gmail Ads by rhamzeh on Saturday June 24, 2017 @07:49AM (#14625283)

I think the freemium model discussed here is severely limiting your product and it's value for non-paying customers in order to get them to pay up.

One of the most powerful advantages of Gmail vs the competition is it's superbly powerful spam filtering and search features - I doubt it's worth losing that powerful image in order to get a few more users to pay up.

Just like the biggest advantage and product feature ProtonMail has is privacy and encryption - it would be a bad product decision to remove encryption from all free customers in order to get them to pay up.

The alternative is to offer a fully functional free* model that focuses on your strength, and charge customers for extra - extremely useful and important, but non product essential - features.

* Some would argue that Google's model is not free, as you are paying for it with your data, but that is a different discussion and outside the scope here.

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