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.
Right when the guitar solo hits
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.
For YouTube, viewers aren’t the users, advertisers are.
Yeah let’s just do an ad break during the most interesting part of EVERY video. Sounds amazing… not
Yes but… YouTube its maybe the One and only online service that have no competition so… They dont really care
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…
Enshittification
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’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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I am a YUGE fan of FreeTube, a cross-platform YT client for the desktop. You can subscribe to channels, create, save, import, and export playlists…and no. Ads. Tis the bees knees.
And just a friendly reminder to donate to your favorite FOSS projects.
YouTube really likes to just destroy itself huh?
Youtube has ads?
When I have to visit it sans adblocker it is like a dumpster fire.
On my tv, yes :(
