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.
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 stopped using YouTube years ago. Fuck that shit.
I use YT and have not seen an ad in years. I do not understand people who have not disabled ads.
You can use it through chrome without ads sure but it works like hot garbage.
I use it daily on Firefox on Linux and on Windows and on android using Revanced
It works exactly like YouTube but without ads and with sponsorblock
Most of my favorite channels are on nebula now anyway. Just need Technology Connections and Mark Rober (my kids LOVE Mark Rober) to make the jump.
I’ve been meaning to try nebula, that lifetime membership sounds hella great!!
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.)
You could use alternatives if you specifically want some videos. Grayjay can play videos from multiple platforms.
Knew from inception Gemini was shit
Gemini is actually legit the best LLM I’ve used locally for anything, consistently faster and more accurate than even models taking up about double the resources
Shame it’s stupid locked down even in my ollama installation and it’s near impossible to get it to do something daddy google doesn’t like. Ah well, works really well for checking my garbage config files lol
They don’t even need Gemini for this… They are just shoving into everyones face. I am sure data they have on people was watching the video is all they need and doesn’t take “ai” to figure it out.
Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.
Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.
And revanced youtube for android does the same.
It doesn’t make the “turn off your adblock” popup go away though.
I’ve never seen that. YMMV, I guess.
It might be something they’re testing. I had it and then it went away for a bit and now its back. I emulate android on my PC just so I can use an app that has no ads.
Make sure your ublock lists are up to date, sometimes the extension gets a bit stuck and needs a nudge to update them.
It’s an arms race and Google hasn’t won it yet.
I swear to god, one of these days the update will be “Today Youtube has announced that they will be removing the annoying videos from their ads”.
And we’ll doom scroll through ads as though they’re shorts, which I guess they are anyway.
We really are getting all media turned into the radio from Demolition Man.
If I go to YouTube to watch a trailer for an upcoming movie THAT IS THE AD. I don’t need a different ad (and definitely not 2-3) first. Get your money from the corpos putting the trailer up.
The Marvel movie Thunderbolts has 4 main trailers on YouTube right now. Those have 9.6, 14, 15, and 21 million views. Marvel/Disney should be paying YouTube for 60m ad impressions. The fee shouldn’t be taken out of my free time.
Isn’t that called Facebook?
Mfs will try to turn my phone into an electronic billboard.
Already experiencing it, can’t even follow along a simple shot explanation
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.
classifier model which labels the ads
Not exactly my idea, I read about it somewhere when news about YT supposedly serving server-side ads started to spread.
You could record the video several times and check for differences between streams and then cut them off, might be more resource intensive in network and storage, but I think it’s still cheaper than a neural network hogging the GPU.
I love you. Please spread it fucking everywhere when you do.
I really wanted to make a system that would recognize if it’s seen the same 30-second clip before (since ads are always repeats) by a shared signature that would just play something else or silence for the length of the ad on the client side, especially for live sports streams.
since ads are always repeat
For now. Netflix announced generative AI ads for 2026
“Netflix members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said, according to the publication.
This is so hilarious when you think about it.
Are their movies and shows so bad that people are watching ads with as much attention?
Or do they mean “pay as much attention” by ignoring the content altogether as they only run Netflix as background noise while they do something else?
😂
Fwiw I kinda wanna see what awful slop their generative ai ads will be. Literally the first time in years I’ve been mildly interested to see an ad. Not that I’ll stop blocking ads to see them, but, mildly interested.
Yeah this would still hit 100% of ads that have happened before now. And all linear tv ads on streams. Seriously willing to build it if anyone wants to work on it with me. Pm me
I don’t understand why this needs AI. I’m guessing this is just more marketing nonsense. You can already see the “most engaged moments” by simply hovering over the timeline.
Google’s been deploying engagement models before anyone even knew the name OpenAI.
This is oldschool machine learning, driven by viewing metrics from users. Gemini is just a brand.
That’s because it doesn’t. Just don’t tell the investors.
At some point you would think the investors would get upset about all the lying…
You know. I feel like its a bit obvious to say but a system where corporations are operated top-down by a group of individuals whose only interest is the profitability of said corporation with little to no consideration in other aspects of the corporation (the employees for one) is a pretty bad system. I remember reading that Henry Ford wanted to drop the price of the Model T to make it even more of an everyman car. Two of his top investors took him to court over it. This isn’t to say Ford was some sort of paragon; but it strikes me sometime, the degree to which the naked greed of some people pierces the capitalist veil of competitive innovation for social betterment.
This only strikes us plebes when we find out about it. It is common knowledge in economist circles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_primacy
The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits: a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
This has only been recently challenged as a PR attempt to rebrand it into “stakeholder capitalism”
Also, not related but equally horrifying: in macroeconomics there is a target of unemployment of around 5%, aka full employment is to be avoided: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAIRU
It’s worth noting that Dodge (yes, that Dodge) were the ones who took Ford to court over it. If you want the reason why shareholders come first, blame Dodge.
Riiight. Id like to learn more about Dodge; I’m gomna check if there’s a Ken Bursesque History of Dodge documentary.
Edit: there is no such documentary.
Edit 2: But there is a fairly decent one.
Ford owed them dividends since they had shares from when they worked for him. And the Dodge Bros asked for these dividends but Ford basically already spent it on cutting wages, building factories, lower the price of cars, kissing puppies etc. All of which, as you may have noticed, is shit that investors (i.e. the Dodge Bros) hate in the short term, while, of course, expanding his business in the long term. Ford had a plan to buy them out, ya see. And, honestly, I can understand why they took him to court for that. Cuz he purposely made decisions that went against their interests as investors because they were his competitor. And the Dodge Bros, they’re not some pampered plutocrats, they came from a fairly impoverished backround - the details of which I won’t bore you with, as they are the same as every other rags to riches Americana. Though I do think its worth mentioning that they were not initially accepted among the social elite as they would drink beers and roughhouse with the men.¹
All of this is very interesting, but it kind of muddies the water in terms of serving as an example of greedy investors forcing the corporate hand. But what if the hand that guides the corporate hand is not the investors’ but the invisible hand of the market?² And the Dodge Bros and Ford are just puppets to the invisible hand³ as it guides them along with a relationship to the wellbeing of actual humans⁴ that could be characterised as arbitrary at best and malicious at worst. Maybe that’s the lesson here.
That and that Henry Ford is a scary motherfucker.
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Which is, I suppose, another rags to riches Americana story, but its one that’s pretty charming, a kind of, still one of the boys attitude, a dream that you can become wealthy and not be innately corrupted by that wealth. Like the Dodge Bros eventually were.
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Which, looking at it now, I appreciate is a contrived metaphor, but it sounded good in my head.
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The invisible hand is doing one of those Godfather cover art pupeteer with strings and shit. They’re not sock puppets. I did consider making a fist-of-capitalism-up-your-ass joke here but it sidetracks the issue a bit, and its a bit sexist/kink shamey.
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And plants and trees and animals.
We need more comments with endnotes
. . . Yet
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It’s a funny story because Ford was suspecting them of building a rival car company so he wasn’t doing it entirely out of altruistic pursuits. He wanted to them to get lower profits from their Ford investments. Whenever you think capitalists have reached the peak of greed, they truly innovate.
Too greedy. They want all the money so bad they will believe any conman.
Doesn’t matter because they get a cut every time they let their friends lie to the board. Executives get a cut every time they seem like they’re approving something. No one is personally liable for the lie. And those selling the lie get bonuses on every contract until they can sell the company to the next bag holder. It’s all imaginary power plays to funnel money.
That only works after the video is out and has usage statistics.
This could theoretically start to identify those moments before the video is public.
I mean… an “if” statement is technically AI, so investors can see the buzz word and all Google has to code is “if most engaged moment, then play ad” lol
conditional and logical expressions have been the foundation of computing since the very beginning. you are using a definition of “AI” that is completely divorced from that history.
That’s not AI.
It’s a computer (Artificial) making a choice that is better than random (Intelligence)
What it is not is a LLM (aka chatbot). It isn’t even any type of neural network. Does not make it any less AI though
No, it’s a computer making a computation. The programmer is the one using intelligence by choosing the appropriate computation for the situation at hand.
It’s a computer (Artificial) making a choice that is better than random (Intelligence)
That’s not what AI is, that’s just programming. AI implies the software was trained on a dataset in order to make pseudo-decisions on its own about the best way to do things.
That’s machine learning, AI just means artificial intelligence.
And artificial intelligence is still not basic programming.
Machine learning is artificial intelligence…
Its a subset of artificial intelligence, not the only type.
They already do it in Podcasts and it is usually extremely ham-fisted. The presenter will be mid sentence talking about something and suddenly IMPROVE YOUR DIET WITH FACTOR
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Or stand up specials. So much comedy on YouTube and they just drop Dick Pills TM commercials in the middle of punchlines.
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…no? It doesn’t.
Yes, it does. You are either hiring someone to determine when you place ads on the stream at best spot or you are having AI do that task
LOL what? No, you just program the software to place it. No AI required.
If the analytics cross over a certain threshold, trigger an ad.
This is extremely simple and does not require an LLM.
This is fucking hilariously evil and short-sighted.
You just described end-stage capitalism
More enshittification!
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.
laughs in uBlock Origin
laughs in invidious. google doesn’t even get to know I’m watching anything
Yep - I legit haven’t seen an ad on YT in years. I also, just the other day, ran across another filter that disables the stupid shorts since I don’t care for that format or YT pushing it on me all the time. Almost usable platform now.
Laughs in FreeTube.
… Revanced
SmartTube
…yt-dlp
I just pay for premium. Worth every penny with the amount of YouTube we watch.
Thank you for giving Google money.
With your endearing support, Google is paying less attention to us so we can continue getting the same content for free.
No problem, I like supporting all the neat content creators I follow while others are happy to rip them off because they feel entitled to free content.
And don’t give me the “support them on patreon” line because a) I already do and b) ain’t no way the majority of you who pirate YouTube are donating money to everyone you follow.
“pirate YouTube” lmfao
bet you’re one of those people that pirate oxygen
I donate to the top percentile of those I follow, at least.
RedLetterMedia ain’t getting ad revenue. They curse too much and Mike is an alcoholic.
but to put it plainly, I’m morally bankrupt on victimless crime and I know they’re taken care of.
again, thank you.
If you pay premium, then you have to be logged in and tracked and spied on, even more data get sold. You pay them to sell your data!
Plus the first-party app is atrocious. The third party ones are way better.
minor krill issue
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t YouTube still running year over year at a loss?
Last I checked Alphabet had something like $60 billion in profit.
At this point, they probably consider YouTube to be a loss leader while they siphon up everyone’s data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Finances
In Q2 2024, ad revenue rose to $8.66 billion, up 13% on Q1.[321]
I don’t think so.
Revenue is not profit.
Yes, I know, but I doubt 8.6 billions per quarter aren’t enough to make a profit.
They haven’t stated their operating costs, so you’re only speculating.
Operating costs are not known with that granularity, to my knowledge, but it’s a good guess. Best anybody can tell Youtube is 10-ish percent of all of Alphabet’s ad revenue and they have a subscription model as well. Not to mention the data gathering for AI training, plus all the intangible benefits from owning all the video on the Internet, from using Youtube tech for Google Drive stored videos to… you know, owning all the video on the Internet. And all of that without investing the ungodly amount of money Netflix and the other streaming competitors do on content. People just… upload that crap.
However their internal accounting breaks down, I’m pretty sure nobody thinks Youtube is bleeding money.
YouTube was almost bankrupted because the cost of storage, servers and bandwidth greatly overran the ad revenue. Every idiot with 2 subscribers uploading dozens of hours of content cost them a ton of money. It is easy to underestimate how expensive video streaming infrastructure is.
Yes, if you re-read my previous comment I said I don’t think they are losing money.
Facebook has spent something like 70 billion dollars on the “metaverse” with nothing to show for it, so it’s very possible.
I mean it must be? The only income it has is based on ads from Google.
I guess that’s what happens when you hire the top minds from yahoo
uBlock Origin zaps all of the ads for me on my laptop.
My phone too
I use Firefox. Is Ublock Origin still effective on YouTube since Google shoved out Manifest V3 onto Chromium-based browsers?
Firefox is not chromium based. You can install unlock origin and have no ads.
Yes, I already do.
I asked because I don’t know if anyone who does use a Chromium browser has noticed an uptick in ads.
Don’t use a chromium based browser.
I did say I use Firefox. I was asking those who don’t.
Reading is hard. My advice still stands for everyone else though.
It works for me, yes. At least on Windows 11. Forgive my technical ineptitude.
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.
That’s a task for a different administration.
They don’t have that authority‽
There’s been this tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats at the FCC for like a solid decade or more now about whether the internet is classified as a “communications service” or an “information service.” If it’s classified as a communications service then the FCC has regulatory authority and can do things like enforce net neutrality. If it’s classified as an information service, then the Federal Comminications Commission does not have authority to regulate it. The Biden FCC had been working to bring back net neutrality, but all that is pretty much out the window with a GOP toady in charge of the FCC now.
It really needs to be codified by congress to have sticking power for it to be regulated by the FCC or the tug-of-war for how to refulate the internet will continue indefinitely.
I’m fairly sure the Communications Commission regulates information services. Even this guy at the notorious Federalist Society’s blog says it does.
Because advertisers want viewers to associate their products with feelings of annoyance, aggravation, and frustration?
But you’ve heard of me!
/s
