The Gmail Effect Grows

One of the most visible areas of change in 2005 will be how email newsletters format their ads as a result of the increasing influence of Gmail. As we all know by now, Gmail strips out all graphics by default. You have to proactively turn them back on and do so on an email by email basis. This is going to dramatically effect how newsletter publishers embed their sponsor's messages into the email since Gmail represents the email equivalent of TiVo, at least as far as ad skipping is concerned.

For instance we have moved all of our trade related email newsletters to our Gmail accounts so that they no longer take up space in our business inboxes. That way, we can use Google's search algorithms to find specific articles or mentions in all of the business-related newsletters we subscribe to. The downside is that we haven't seen an ad in any of the these publications since we started using Gmail.

More of our peers will do the same thing over the next year, which means that if a company is trying to reach us, they better have the message in text format. Hence, content rather than graphics will become more important in driving clicks. Newsletters devoting chunks of real estate to large banners and skyscrapers are probably going to have to rethink the design of their pages.