Gmail Stealth Ads in Promotion Tab
There is a discussion online that search engines are fading the backgrounds of ads in search results to make them difficult to differentiate between the organic or paid of the search results. You can read in detailed in
this post. Fearing of Google and Matt Cutts action, I have
nofollow the link. Well, back to the ads that are getting difficult to figure out day by day shows how Search Engine big daddies are trying to monetize more, earn more and more from their loyal users.
Taking this step further, Google is moving ahead of others. They now have stealth the ads as mail in the Gmail's Promotion tab. Here is the screen shot of ads in Gmail inbox:
From above screen capture its difficult to differentiate ads and original promotional mails. Flip your laptop screen to figure out which are ads or mails.
From this, there is always a doubt in the intention of Google's new inventions. The timing of these ads and recent launch of Tabs in Gmail shows that the intention was already set to use this to target users and fool them to click on those ads. Since, these ads are charged only for once you click to the ad and then the motive of Google is fulfilled. On clicking, we get the original Google promotional mail:
The mail stats on the right hand side:
What's this?
It's
a new type of ad which you can forward to a friend, or star to save it
to your inbox. If you dismiss this ad, you won't see it again.
In start, I thought Google has done a great job to differentiate between different types of mail and classifieds them in different tabs. Indeed they had, but why they are fooling users with the similarity to that of inbox inline.
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