Google’s bottom line is primarily funded through advertising revenue, this is nothing new and the company is always looking to make it’s inboxes even more advertising friendly. It"s no surprise that the company likes to inject advertisements anywhere it can, but the result of this is that the company can offer services, such as email, for free. It’s the fact that Google drives its revenue not through software sales, but through advertisements, so that it is able to compete with Microsoft so easily as it can to offer software for less than Microsoft (Android) and not have it impact its revenue.
So, in order to help pump up the amount of times you click on “promotional” emails in your inbox, Google is testing a new grid-view that makes the spam emails more appealing.
You can get this new feature on your Gmail account right now by clicking here, but there"s no word on if this new view will be pushed out to all users.
Email has been a hot topic of late when it was discovered that Microsoft accessed an Outlook account after it was determined that the user was stealing trade-secretes from the company. While Google claims that they never look into Gmail user accounts, there are reports that contradict this statement.
There"s no word on if this feature will ever leave the testing phases, like so many other ideas, but knowing Google and their advertising friendly approach, we would expect this grid-view option to eventually make its way into all Gmail accounts.
Source: Google