Ah--love Ben&#x27;s blog and podcast (listen to it several times a week during my commute).<p>His point is a good one.  In terms of feeds of potential branding interest, beyond Youtube, Google&#x27;s big (and mostly untapped) opportunity is in Gmail.<p>They made a stride to first assert control and doing users a favor by moving things to the Promotions tab.  Now they have their ads in the email &quot;feed&quot; in that tab.  The Inbox product, IMHO, was their attempt at redefining email into an fully algorithmically-curated feed ala FB, Twitter and Reddit.<p>My personal bet is that Inbox was a proof of concept and they will force Gmail to shift to that approach in the not too distant future.  If users don&#x27;t leave en masse, I would not be surprised at all to see Google forcing advertisers to pay to get into the inboxes of Gmail users--even users who have explicitly asked for promotional emails.  That was FB&#x27;s brilliant gambit (that somewhat blew up in their face).  They convinced advertisers to invest in building an audience on the FB platform (so FB owned the audience), let them see revenue from it, and then switched from a &quot;communicate all you like to everyone who Likes you for free!&quot; model to a &quot;pay us on an auction model if you want to reach anyone&quot; model.  Many advertisers consider it a huge bait-and-switch play, but I can&#x27;t deny that it seems to have been successful.  And that is why I won&#x27;t be surprised to see Google follow suit there.