If you depend on Gmail for your email communication, but you're tired of seeing ads in your inbox, there's a simple way to get rid of them, though it may mean swapping one problem for another.
I’m genuinely shocked that there are people out there that view ads. Between ublock and pihole depending on location I can barely think of the last ads I saw.
edit: i just disabled adblockers.... still no ads.. Genuinely confused
edit2: OK read the article and none of the settings where there. Just went into my alt gmail account, and I have the ads and the settings mentioned in the article. I guess my main gmail account is so old (2010?) it does not have these features
I'm pretty sure they're talking about the subtle ad disguised as an email in the promotions tab, its not even from someone I wouldn't expect to send me an email, that's why it's so sneaky. It's literally a promotion from a company whose emails I'm subscribed to.
To skirt around the ads, you must disable the Promotions, Social, and Forums tabs. That's where it gets a bit tricky. If you depend on the Social tab to keep you updated on your various social networking feeds, you'll want to keep that enabled, but doing so will not prevent ads from showing up.
Apparently I either already did this so many years ago that I don't remember doing it, or my account is so old (2006) that it predates these settings being added and they defaulted to "off" when added to existing accounts.
Email is something where it can be worth a few currency units per yr for a fast / privacy focused email account that doesn’t contribute to your metadata profile.