Ads Changing For Outlook.com

"It was going to happen sooner or later: the clean minimalist Outlook.com will soon start displaying advertisements alongside your inbox and emails."

"The versaTiles are basically display ads based around flexible-sized tile strips that appear along the right-hand side of the screen, next to your main inbox view. They also appear when you are inside an email.At first glance, the ads appear similar to the text ads Gmail users get in their inbox, but when you hover over the Outlook ads, they reveal images, videos, or more info. The Outlook ads are targeted at online retailers, who can pick from three templates for slideshows, videos, images, or catalogue style adverts."

I think I'd almost rather endure it the Gmail way. The bright side of this is that if we use an actual e-mail program to check webmail accounts, we might be able to avoid it.

 

Re: Ads Coming To Outlook.com

Well crap! Lol, thank you JR, it looks like I edited my post a wee much

 

Re: Ads Coming To Outlook.com

Craziness man. After all the dissing of Google etc. Understand that they are not scanning your emails as Google does, but still.

 

Re: Ads Coming To Outlook.com

Yeah, and as much of a privacy guy I am, I still have to pause a moment and think if asked whether it's better to have my mail auto-scanned and the ads actually relevant, or to just get a bunch of completely random picture/banner ads sitting alongside the mail I want to read (they say it'll be text until you hover over it, but watch how soon that changes). You know eventually some Viagra ads and other crap are going to start showing up. At first glance it seems almost better to have Google serve up a text ad for some music company after they read me discussing a band in my email.

I don't know, that's not an easy choice to make, lol.

 

Re: Ads Coming To Outlook.com

Those tiles have been there ever since the previews I think, but have just been plain text referencing certain parts of Outlook.com's service.

 

Re: Ads Coming To Outlook.com

Yes that's what I have seen so far too, plain text

 

Re: Ads Coming To Outlook.com

What do you mean ads are coming? Ads have been in Hotmail/Outlook forever. The difference is that Hotmail/Outlook doesn't scan your mail to produce "relevant" ads.

What this story is about is a new style of ads, that quite frankly are MUCH better. It won't prevent me from blocking them, though.

 

Re: Ads Coming To Outlook.com

I use POP3/SMTP to interact with Outlook.com, so I didn't have any problems yet But if the need arises, I will find a way to block them on the webpage as well.

 

Re: Ads Coming To Outlook.com

You're absolutely right. I've known there were some ads in Outlook.com because attaching files doesn't always work with ad blocking enabled, plus I've seen them. The title of my thread is poorly worded and I'll try to fix it.

Whether these ads will be better I'm not sure of.

Edit: Tried to fix the title, but it only shows the edit in the original post. Either way, I hope the subject is much clearer now.