Google is stopping one of the most controversial advertising formats: ads inside Gmail that scan e-mail content.
The decision did not come from Google’s ad team, but from its cloud unit, which is angling to sign up more corporate customers.
Alphabet Inc’s Google Cloud sells a package of office software, called G Suite, that competes with market leader Microsoft Corp.
Paying Gmail users never received the e-mail-scanning ads like the free version of the program, but some business customers were confused by the distinction and its privacy implications, Google senior vice president of cloud Diane Greene said.
“What we’re going to do is make it unambiguous,” she said.
Ads are to continue to appear inside the free version of Gmail as promoted messages, but instead of scanning a user’s e-mail, the ads will be targeted with other personal information Google already pulls from sources such as search and YouTube.
Ads based on scanned e-mail messages drew lawsuits and some of the most strident criticism the company faced in its early years, but offered marketers a more targeted way to reach consumers.
Greene’s ability to limit ads, Google’s lifeblood, shows her growing clout at the company.
Since her arrival in late 2015, Google has poured investments into its cloud-computing and business software tools to catch up to Microsoft and Amazon.com Inc.
Greene announced the changes on Friday in a blog post, where she wrote that G Suite has more than 3 million paying companies and had more than doubled its user base among large businesses in the past year.
Google does not share its cloud division sales, but its “other revenues,” which include those numbers, grew 49 percent to US$3.09 billion in the first quarter.
The New Taiwan dollar is on the verge of overtaking the yuan as Asia’s best carry-trade target given its lower risk of interest-rate and currency volatility. A strategy of borrowing the New Taiwan dollar to invest in higher-yielding alternatives has generated the second-highest return over the past month among Asian currencies behind the yuan, based on the Sharpe ratio that measures risk-adjusted relative returns. The New Taiwan dollar may soon replace its Chinese peer as the region’s favored carry trade tool, analysts say, citing Beijing’s efforts to support the yuan that can create wild swings in borrowing costs. In contrast,
Nvidia Corp’s demand for advanced packaging from Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) remains strong though the kind of technology it needs is changing, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said yesterday, after he was asked whether the company was cutting orders. Nvidia’s most advanced artificial intelligence (AI) chip, Blackwell, consists of multiple chips glued together using a complex chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging technology offered by TSMC, Nvidia’s main contract chipmaker. “As we move into Blackwell, we will use largely CoWoS-L. Of course, we’re still manufacturing Hopper, and Hopper will use CowoS-S. We will also transition the CoWoS-S capacity to CoWos-L,” Huang said
VERTICAL INTEGRATION: The US fabless company’s acquisition of the data center manufacturer would not affect market competition, the Fair Trade Commission said The Fair Trade Commission has approved Advanced Micro Devices Inc’s (AMD) bid to fully acquire ZT International Group Inc for US$4.9 billion, saying it would not hamper market competition. As AMD is a fabless company that designs central processing units (CPUs) used in consumer electronics and servers, while ZT is a data center manufacturer, the vertical integration would not affect market competition, the commission said in a statement yesterday. ZT counts hyperscalers such as Microsoft Corp, Amazon.com Inc and Google among its major clients and plays a minor role in deciding the specifications of data centers, given the strong bargaining power of
TARIFF SURGE: The strong performance could be attributed to the growing artificial intelligence device market and mass orders ahead of potential US tariffs, analysts said The combined revenue of companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange for the whole of last year totaled NT$44.66 trillion (US$1.35 trillion), up 12.8 percent year-on-year and hit a record high, data compiled by investment consulting firm CMoney showed on Saturday. The result came after listed firms reported a 23.92 percent annual increase in combined revenue for last month at NT$4.1 trillion, the second-highest for the month of December on record, and posted a 15.63 percent rise in combined revenue for the December quarter at NT$12.25 billion, the highest quarterly figure ever, the data showed. Analysts attributed the
RSS