[miskin]

Similarly, thanks to async ad loading, gmail replaces first two items in my email list with ads with such a convinient delay that I accidentaly click on the ads more often than I would like to. Occam's razor would say that if it can bring more money, it is not accident.

[lima]

Accidental clicks are invalid clicks according to Google's own documentation[1][2].

For this to not be an accident, one would have to assume that Google actually makes more money from those invalid clicks, and that someone decided that yep, rendering ads asynchronously was a decent and legal approach at increasing advertising revenue, and requested the GMail team to implement it.

This kind of corporate misbehavior is not unheard of, but I just can't imagine it happening at Google.

It's much more likely that this is just unfortunate UX design to "improve" rendering performance without considering users on slow connections.

(I can reproduce this one just fine in desktop GMail - on the first render of the "Promotions" tab, the ads render asynchronously)

[1]: https://support.google.com/google-ads/answer/42995?hl=en

[2]: https://www.blog.google/products/ads/preventing-accidental-c...

[FridgeSeal]

"No you don't understand: invalid clicks are things that happen on other peoples properties. You definitely meant to click that ad in gmail. We know, we're google, you can definitely trust us about this"

'Unfortunate UX design to 'improve' rendering' is the plausible-deniability they can use to justify this.

> This kind of corporate misbehavior is not unheard of, but I just can't imagine it happening at Google.

I definitely can, I don't think anywhere is immune to this once you reach a certain scale. They have a profit-motive to make money, they will absolutely try and get away with as much as they possibly can.