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.
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 don’t think the outrage is so much about the existence of the ads, but rather the intentionally obnoxious placement of such, but go off in defense of billion dollar companies king.
Yeah, that will certainly increase pay for creators instead of buying-out the next company /s