Coming soon: Better Ads in Gmail

http://mail.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1217362&ctx=share

• Fewer irrelevant ads
• Gmail’s importance ranking applied to ads
• Offers and coupons for your local area

With Gmail, we try to do as good a job with ads as we do with email. We use Gmail ourselves, and want its ads to be as relevant and useful as possible.
If you've been using Gmail for a while, you may have noticed a time or two where we've missed. Bad ads tend to annoy people. We're trying to cut down on these ads, and make the ones you do see much more useful.

With features like Priority Inbox, we’ve been working hard to help sort through the ‘bacn’ in your messages -- the unimportant messages that get in your way. Soon we’re going to try a similar approach to ads: using some of the same signals that help predict which messages are likely to be important to you, Gmail will better predict which ads may be useful to you. For example, if you’ve recently received a lot of messages about photography or cameras, a deal from a local camera store might be interesting. On the other hand if you’ve reported these messages as spam, you probably don’t want to see that deal.
Only a few users will notice the change to begin with, but as we improve it we’ll roll it out more widely. As always, ads in Gmail are fully automated-no humans read your messages- and no messages or personally identifiable information about you is shared with advertisers. You can read about the principles we follow for advertising in mail here.




We’ve already cut down the number of ads shown per Gmail user by more than a third, and we hope these signals will enable us to continue to show fewer, better ads in Gmail.
As with many Gmail features, you can control the use of these signals from the Gmail Settings page.
 source: Coming soon: Better Ads in Gmail