IT WAS GOING to happen sooner or later: The clean, minimalist Outlook com will soon start displaying advertisements alongside your inbox and email messages.
Microsoft announced users in the United States and Brazil will be the first to see the new-format ads, christened versaTiles. Australia. Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, and the United Kingdom are set to follow suit soon.
The New versaTiles
Microsoft's versaTiles are basically display ads based on flexible-size 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, which can pick from three templates for slideshows, videos, images, or catalog-style advertisements.
Four to five ad tiles are located on the right side of Outlook.com; advertisers can buy an entire lot and customize each tile to show different content or messages.
Ads Inevitable?
Since Outlook com is a free service, used by 60 million people at last count, ads in its interface were bound to arrive sooner or later.
At least you won't see the standard type of banners cluttering up the site. Instead, you'll see more carefully prepared campaigns.
But since Microsoft doesn’t scan your email to serve ads based on topics - as Google does with Gmail - the chances of the Outlook.com ads being as carefully targeted as Gmail's are not that good. So Outlook.com's ads may not be as relevant to you as Google's ads.
Post a Comment