So, it has come down to this. Normally, when a particular new service makes its debut online or on the air, it tends to offer plenty of freebies without the hassle of advertisements, but once it has grown in size and become hugely popular, this is where the money making schemes start to make more sense. Case in point, everyone loves Gmail – more or less. I have yet to meet someone who loathes Gmail and sticks to their other webmail accounts as the primary one. Well, Gmail has done remarkably well for itself over the years, where in May this year, an update for Gmail was introduced, being marketed as “a new inbox.”
It actually split the email that you received into different categories, showing them off in various tabs. The whole idea of this was to offer additional control over what you can see, making sure that checking out your busy inbox is a less overwhelming occurrence. Another tab that Google introduced was Promotions, where emails from Groupon and other group buying sites, in addition to promotions and offers, will end up there. This sounds nice, but the Gmail redesign did involve a new way of advertising, where some have deemed it to be more intrusive than ever. The Promotions tab shows off new emails that were not signed up by the users before, and these have been marked as “Ad” under the sender name, where digging further, it revealed that they are actually Google adverts that have been packaged as emails. Bummer, no? So much for Do No Evil.