About That Free Lunch

Last week I was trading e-mails with my daughter about a marathon we were thinking about running in Nashville this spring. I was using my Gmail account. Gmail is by far the best “free” Web-based e-mail service around. It is easy to use, reliable, and has just the right amount of bells and whistles. I have been using Gmail instead of my own server-based mail program for some time. I spend a lot of time online and have become pretty oblivious to online advertising. If a site has an advertisement that takes over the browser window or starts crawling across my desktop, I “blacklist” that site. Regular banners and medallions and rectangles I just ignore–or at least I thought I did.

Anyway, I was reading our e-mail chain and happened to glance to the right of the text message and see four nicely designed little medallion-size text ads. One was about marathon training, one about an online running journal, one about lodging in Nashville . . . you get the picture. Google scanned my e-mail for keywords and then returned some sponsored links based on those keywords. I don’t know why this surprised me. We are conditioned to expect paid advertisements returned when we do online searches. I just hadn’t made the mental adjustment to expect the same for e-mail.