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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Like all the major free-mail services, Google is relying on ads to turn a profit. But Gmail ads are different; they aren't just appended willy-nilly to the bottom of your message (they don't show up in the body of your message at all, in fact). Gmail robots automatically scan the text of your incoming messages, and then use that information to deliver targeted ads and related links that appear next to incoming messages.
"The goal is we should only show you an ad when we think it's going to be useful to you, based on the same technology that you see on many Adsense Ads," says Brin. "It's the exact same technology that tries to figure out what from our advertisers is likely to be relevant to the reader.
"It will try to find concepts in the message that match concepts we've associated with advertisers, and it will also know how well those various ads performed on all the Adsense sites in our network."
How well do the ads perform? It's a mixed bag.
In preparing for this story, I asked several Gmail beta testers to forward the ads they received to me. An e-mail Jessamyn West received about cheese prompted Gmail to serve several cheese-related links, but no ads. Similarly, an e-mail I sent myself to test the system that contained several San Diego travel-related phrases prompted Gmail to serve San Diego-related links, but again, no ads. But more often than not, even the most obvious-seeming messages failed to produce either ads or related links.
Yet when I added specific products or corporate names to the mix, Gmail typically homed in on them immediately. It also seemed to have a much easier time with technology-related subjects. When a friend bemoaned her corporate e-mail server's tendency to bounce messages over a certain file size, Gmail offered up a sponsored link that would remedy the problem. Messages about Wi-Fi and Web hosting also triggered ads and sponsored links. When I added a few company names to the travel message listed above, Gmail fired back with relevant links. When I sent myself an e-mail with Hoover's data on Costco, Gmail served both sponsored links to Costco and related pages. Furthermore, it's smart enough to figure out that just because an e-mail mentions Costco, that doesn't mean that a Costco ad would be relevant, as evidenced by the H.R.-related ads it served in response to this message.
But it also has a tendency to be goofy. Andre Torrez forwarded a message where Gmail keyed in on an ad appended to the bottom of a Yahoo mail message that had nothing to do with the body of the message. A spam message with a body full of unrelated words triggered two related links and an ad, while a bake sale fundraising e-mail from MoveOn.org triggered ads for "delightful candy bouquets."
Unlike traditional Adsense ads, however, Gmail ads don't collect, or reveal to advertisers, the terms used to deliver the ads. "We're not using any of the data people are clicking on in the messages," says Brin.
In fact, the company is collecting so little data on user click-throughs that Brin claims to be unaware even of how many ads per message Gmail is serving.
"We did not set a target ratio and, to be honest with you, we weren't even exactly sure as of yesterday what the ratio was," says Brin. "Because of all the privacy concerns, we can't get the kind of basic stats that we ought to have. I get the feeling that right now it's maybe a third of the time or so."
