Is it worth advertising on Gmail?

As far as I’m concerned, Gmail is one of Google’s best products. I’m a fan: I’ve been using it since the day it came out, on April 1, 2004. It replaced all the services I used before and is the email account I use for everything, including for business purposes.

My Gmail inbox holds the story of my life, because all I delete is spam. Its benefits are so good, its anti-spam filter so powerful, its unlimited capacity and its user interface so well-designed that I can’t imagine using anything else and obviously I’m not alone: at the end of last year, Gmail was used by more than 1.5 billion people worldwide.

However, I do have one small gripe: the supposedly contextual advertising that appears on the page; messages I am unable to eliminate despite having tried several advertising blockers and that are of no interest to me whatsoever and which I have never, and I mean never, clicked not out of ill will but because not once in 15 years of use have I ever seen an advertisement that interested me even minimally.

Obviously, if those ads are in my inbox, it’s because someone has paid for them to be there. But I can’t imagine what crazy segmentation criteria they are based on. I would be perfectly willing to pay Google to stop putting ads in my Gmail account, but it’s not possible, so I have to resign myself to systematically seeing completely irrelevant messages in the top row of some tabs of my inbox, which I immediately delete and are a waste of my time and advertisers’ money. Sometimes when I do this a menu…