YouTube's new ad strategy is bound to upset users: YouTube Peak Points utilise Gemini to identify moments where users will be most engaged, so advertisers can place ads at the point.
YouTube's new ad strategy is bound to upset users: YouTube Peak Points utilise Gemini to identify moments where users will be most engaged, so advertisers can place ads at the point.
Peak Points place adverts at the point where users are most engaged in a YouTube video.
This week YouTube hosted Brandcast 2025 in which it revealed how marketers could make better use of the platform to connect with customers.
A few new so-called innovations were announced at the event but one has caught the attention of the internet – Peak Points. This new product makes use of Gemini to detect “the most meaningful, or ‘peak’, moments within YouTube’s popular content to place your brand where audiences are the most engaged”.
Essentially, YouTube will use Gemini and probably the heatmap generated on YouTube videos by people skipping to popular points, to determine where to place advertising. Anybody who has grown up watching terrestrial television where adverts arrive as a way to build suspense will understand how annoying Peak Points could become.
Eh this needs to go in fuckai
firefox and uBlock Origin. I don't see ads. Fuck Google and their AI.
Just imagine coming up with shit like this being the only job you can find and not jumping off a building instead.
Imagine ...
THIS IS SP....
Insert unskippable ad here.
ARTA!
A guy I know started selling AI push notifications.
Your app signs up for his service, and he uses what's essentially ChatGPT to find the best time slot to send you custom push notifications. That's just his third party service working with limited data and system access.
Just imagine when Google and Apple start selling that as a service integrated to the OS.
I think it's funny that Google thinks putting an ad in when someone is most engaged with a video will be an effective advertising technique. So someone's going to be absorbed in the video, be presented with an ad while engaging with it and be happy that they were interrupted to be served an ad? Sounds like a great formula for pissing off your users.
Any product that advertises on YT is one I avoid
So I'm sure this will just cause more people to use Ublock and other ad blocking services if that one fails. Maybe this will cause more people to look into making their own Peertube instances. But who am I kidding, normies usually don't like hosting communities themselves...
Enshittification
Why can't they just place the ad at the beginning of the video, Spotify gives you X free uninterrupted songs to listen to after listening to 1,2 adds. Why can't they just follow that model
Right when the guitar solo hits
I've been noticing lately that 800lb Gorilla specials have been cutting to ads right between the setup and punchline of a bit. Mad fucking annoying.
LOL. Like every tech story from the US is about enshittification. too funny.
Advertisers are invasive like zebra mussels.
They already did something similar back in the day. I remember watching a music video some ~10 years ago where they placed an ad like five seconds before the end of the song, right at the musical climax, ruining the mood with surgical precision. I was absolutely infuriated and went off to Google wondering if there's a way to block ads. And the rest is history.
It would be wrong to call it a replacement, but this is a good place to plug !peertube@lemmy.world - there's more quality content on there than many might suspect, especially if you are into FOSS and people tinkering with stuff they are passionate about.
I am used to listening to streams while walking, but I've been noticing the most annoying ads pop-up when I'm interested in something they are saying. This isn't going to make me pay attention to those ads, it's going to drive me to the plethora of other services I can use. The worst thing about it is that it doesn't even pause and cache the stream, meaning that if I was listening to something interesting, the ad just causes me to miss it. Google just keeps eating its own tail.
Content creators need to eat. Platforms need to pay bills and employees. This is, and always has been, central to the issue but nobody will examine it. When presented with two options, one for 1 penny per year with no ads or a free version with ads, people will take the free one.
So there's a push pull happening. People won't pay. Creators need money. Platforms structure to meet the market conditions.
Leeches never stop to think about how content would ever get created if their 🧚magical utopia🧚 of decentralized, on-demand, ad-free video became real. They'll also never pay a motherfucking cent to anybody ever, they'd rather have laborious semantics debates about the meaning of the words "steal" and "theft".
I've met some people who ask why I care so much about not having to see ads. They don't care if there's youtube ads every now and then. At this point they have to care.
Google seems bound and determined to destroy itself trying to escalate it's profits from "staggering" to "colossal." The search is so bad AI is actually better, and that's saying something. And now they want to enshittify YouTube? Okay. I'm sure it won't die right away, but this will be one of the thousands cuts.
Once they finally lock down the player so it's impossible to block or skip ads, I look forward to coding a script which screen records each video on my sub list, feeds each video with ads into a purpose made classifier model which labels the ads, stitches out of ads with FFmpeg, and then uploads them to my jellyfin server.
Migrated away from Google because they're just genuinely useless.
Search results are infested with AI bullshit and SEO slop, can't actually search for anything useful unless you know the website you're looking for, in which case I just go to the website directly.
Youtube curates a selection of completely irrelevant videos to try to shove ads down your throat, I still have to change my user agent string every time because YouTube throws a hissy fit at firefox with ublock.
Gmail is pretty much the same as any other email provider but comes at the expense of your data being sold for advertising purposes.
Don't even get me started on the shit show that is Android.
I run GrapheneOS, Fedora and debian, self host what I can and use decent providers for what I can't. I'm the furthest away from the big tech corps than I've ever been and it feels great to have computers that actually compute and not serve me useless fucking ad drivel.
I used to waste a lot of time on YouTube Shorts, which is the absolute worst way to waste time. I finally deleted the YouTube app completely, and aside from a couple days of withdrawals, it’s been all positive.
I mean, I don’t know anything about the latest video games or movies anymore. And I have to rely on my family to send me Ryan George skits. But that stuff wasn’t actually making my life better, it was just filling it up.
If I want to watch something interesting on my phone, I’ve got Nebula. It doesn’t have all the same content, but it turns out that doesn’t matter a lot when you just want to be entertained/educated for a couple minutes. (It also doesn’t have a comment section. Or Shorts. So yeah, unequivocally better.)
Shit like this is honestly why the FCC needs authority to regulate things on the US internet.
There was a time in the long past where television networks were forced to normalize audio so that commercials weren't so much louder than the shows, which was happening for a while.
The internet just continues to be a fucking free-for-all of all the worst and most anti-user-centric ideas that exist. Just plying every bad idea that makes the internet difficult to use.
No one will even blink at ads on most engaging moments in Youtube videos, in Pornhub ones tho....
We might need a few reforms to our economic model where the stupidest sociopaths alive get lots of money and teachers and nurses do not.
Could probably spin up a new edging community
Already experiencing it, can’t even follow along a simple shot explanation
More enshittification!
Firefox + uBlock origin
I don't find Nebula to be an adequate replacement for youtube, but if they ever figure out how to keep me from blocking ads, Ima gonna change my mind.