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.
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.
It’s the same idiotic MBA reasoning that keeps bringing the popup back in some new form every few years. No, it wasn’t the technical implementation of the delivery mechanism we were upset about, you absolute fucking morons.
It’s always jarring loading a news site without ad blocking. The whole thing just seems cancerous, and that’s before you can even start reading the story.
I recently switched phones and forgot I didn’t have an adblocker installed yet. Clicked on an article and holy shit the modern mobile web is a toxic hellscape without it…
your phones also heats up, and then it gets slow. had to install adblockers to preserve the life of the phone batteries.
For YouTube, viewers aren’t the users, advertisers are.
Yes but… YouTube its maybe the One and only online service that have no competition so… They dont really care
Yeah let’s just do an ad break during the most interesting part of EVERY video. Sounds amazing… not
Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.
Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.
Youtube has ads?
When I have to visit it sans adblocker it is like a dumpster fire.
On my tv, yes :(
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.)
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.
I would argue that this will be far more obnoxious than television commercials. YouTube already places ads directly in the midst of sentences or even words. At least television usually cut to commercial after the line was finished.
This will annoy me to the point of dropping YouTube altogether.
YouTube will put multiple ad breaks into a popular 8 min video. Which is why I use playtube and/or Firefox with ad block unless I’m too hungover to fully function
i tried unblocking my yt to support a creator, but the amount of ads is just too much.
Because nothing endears your platform to users like throwing ads in their face during the high points of whatever they are watching.
It has worked for them for years. It’s just more targeted now.
Because advertisers want viewers to associate their products and brand with feelings of annoyance, aggravation, and frustration?
But you’ve heard of me!
/s
Enshittification
They mean - maximize irritation? Put ads in the most obnoxious way?
There’s a good global task for FOSS alternatives of YouTube and other places where life happens.
A decentralized scraper. Something similar to SETI@home, or that hentai analog for storage. So that based on some metric YT content would be divided between users willing to contribute their machines and accounts to scraping YT (a bit similar to searching DHT, and probably some kind of DHT would be useful), and then they’d download that and re-publish in some p2p alternative.
TBH probably also good for that little of the web that is still possible to represent as static pages and browse via links.
The issue is that alternatives lack content, and the closed nature of proprietary services gives them an advantage - there is content there which doesn’t exist outside of them.
And people just reuploading by hand what they themselves consider interesting are a little fraction of the majority that doesn’t bother.
The core problem is that hosting and streaming videos costs money, and that money must come from somewhere. Unless there is someone with really deep pockets just paying for everything, such a platform must use subscriptions or ads to make some money. Netflix & others use subscriptions, YouTube uses ads, and both even offer combo models.
How would a free variant of YouTube work on the long run? Setting up a small model on a server in your home office, maybe with donations to cover initial hardware costs is not the issue at first, but once you need a computer center and employees you’ll need some serious, regular money coming in.
We’ve had bittorrent for many years.
The issue is creating a global index and dedicating some storage to the less popular (at the moment) data.
One can have paid storage provided over such a network, available only to subscribers. So you want to fetch a video from the global index, there are no peers having it online for free or their upload speed it atrocious, but there are some offering it not for free. You choose them and download, or maybe you have something like trade and auctions automation in MMORPGs - setting for auto-purchase and auto-sale with caps for what you would pay.
That requires a payment system, though, that one can seamlessly connect to identities in such a network.
deleted by creator
But even running an indexer on a YT-like scale would need serious money, even if you spread the hosting and streaming load around. And for most users, this would not be attractive, as you probably would have to torrent the data first and view it later.
Then there is the issue with responsibility. If someone throws e.g. CSAM into the system, who could be held responsible? Who would have to deal with DMCA notices? Who would deal with issues like “Dictator X demands all videos showing him in a bad light to be removed immediately!”
And: Opening a payment system is a serious can of worms, especially if you need it to work internationally.
Honestly, I’m not against a YT alternative, but I don’t want it to die after three weeks because the person behind is was too optimistic to consider to potential problems.
Yes, I agree.
It appears GNU Taler is seeing some initial deployments. That’s for payment system.
An index can have centralized control, while being itself decentralized. Like for checking certificates you don’t contact some CA website every time, you have a certificate chain, cryptographically verified. That’s for CSAM and DMCA notices. That center can deal with them, sending deletion notices signed with their certificate or whatever, or recalling index entries. Those would have to propagate over the network fast enough, of course.
That system just has to allow plugging in paid services in a uniform way. Then the serious money part will not be as important.
With torrents one can have sequential downloads, and again, with paid services one could have those having new publications faster and with better download speeds.
The word “uniform” is the only thing differentiating this from the Internet we already have.
With Taler I wait for it to work the kinks out. And, of course, for it to be available somewhere reasonable.
I’m in Russia, I’ll probably see Taler here only after Putin.
All this also doesn’t take into account how creators gets paid.
It’s a big system, with enough moving parts that I understand the ad/pay model existing. I just wish they weren’t such prices about how they choose to operate it sometimes.
You’re right, cost of content creation comes on top of the running costs, too.
You should pay off you don’t like the ads.
YT + Music is a fantastic value.
Queue a line of people screaming it’s trash while not being able to get over their addiction of the service.
Im with you on this. Ive had premium youtube since it was google music and I could upload my own mp3 collection. It is well worth the cost.
Agree. I love my ad blockers and 🏴☠️ but I happily pay for YouTube because it’s given me so much over the years
Imagine …
THIS IS SP…
Insert unskippable ad here.
ARTA!
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.
YouTube really likes to just destroy itself huh?
it started the moment they stop moderating Right wing propaganda.
