It's unclear to me how much of Gmail was made possible due to immediate pocket lining potential, and how much was possible due to their bringing the model of "o

It's unclear to me how much of Gmail was made possible due to immediate pocket lining potential, and how much was possible due to their bringing the model of "offer orders of magnitude more service than what the average person will use, and absorb the outliers in the margins" to a web app service. I don't think Gmail started out with heavy email content harvesting and integrated advertising but I could be misremembering.