Not becoming a click robot for Google

For about a year or so I have been finding myself clicking on ads instead of clicking on emails, apparently by accident. The video below illustrates this.

It shows how I am trying to select an email (perhaps for deletion), and when I have finally moved the mouse into position, Google decides to show an ad instead of the email, moving the email down by one row.

As a result, I end up clicking on the ad instead of the email, generating ad revenue for Google while not being interested in the ad at all.

I have been a Gmail user for at least two decades, and like most people, I use it either in the app or in the browser (rather than a dedicated email client) nearly all of the time.

Both app and browser have this problem. I am not saying Google delays the display of the ad deliberately. But surely any attempt they made at improving the latency of the ad display would have undergone an A/B test. And the test would have found that ad profits decrease if ads are shown faster.

So I would assume they would have decided to keep it, and perhaps even optimized the delay for better A/B test results. That's not exactly evil, but it's optimizing for profit instead of optimizing for the customer.

And so the customer ends up being a robot generating ad clicks for Google. This has been the case for me for at least a year, perhaps longer. I decided it's time to move on to a different email provider, even if it means starting to pay for email services.

So I created a paid-for account at Proton Mail. And no, they are not paying me for saying this here.

初めてウィッグを用意する際は、カットやセットに必要な時間も含めて準備すると安心です。複数の候補を比較する際は、コスプレ ロングウィッグで仕様の違いを確認できます。使用後は毛流れを整えて十分に乾かし、形が崩れない状態で保管することが大切です。