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 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.
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.
-
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.
-
Which, looking at it now, I appreciate is a contrived metaphor, but it sounded good in my head.
-
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.
-
And plants and trees and animals.
We need more comments with endnotes
. . . Yet
-
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.
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 only works after the video is out and has usage statistics.
This could theoretically start to identify those moments before the video is public.
deleted by creator
…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.
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?
I don’t know, I don’t have a Facebook account. But I can believe you’re right.
Mfs will try to turn my phone into an electronic billboard.
Every day we get closer to the All-Despising Baby Skull.
now they will just force, you must watch this amount of ads before starting a video, and would try to prevent you from accessing said video with any adblocker.
deleted by creator
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.
Those who don’t use Firefox should.
deleted by creator
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.
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.
Pretty wild seeing an ad for UL out in the wild in these comments, you an electrician?
I got my MTR in UL 508A a couple years ago
Architect, so in the neighborhood… I mostly interact with UL in the context of fire-rated assemblies, though.
Ahh my context is all related to industrial electrical systems. It gets really fun when UL and NFPA 79 start to conflict with each other.
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
Willing to bet uBlock Origin will make it so I never see a single one of these ads.
Firefox forever.
And Revanced for android is just 😘🤌 chef’s kiss.
I’m a Newpipe man myself but Revanced is also fantastic.
Hey, Newpipe’s a banger too, just not what I found first. I fully support anything that takes away from Google’s profits
I use CleanTube, myself!
Cool, I’ll have a look!
Can you get it for iPhone?
Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.
Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.
And revanced youtube for android does the same.
Firefox X UBlock Origin X Sponsorblock X Bring Back Youtube Dislike. Thank fuck for those Devs.
The removal of YouTube dislike is still fucking infuriating to me. I get it: now I have to watch the video to find out if it’s a piece of shit, and that’s exactly what they want, but holy fuck what a shitty decision designed to waste my time and maximize their chances to flash an ad in my face.
Absolutely. It sucks so much for me to not be able to see that most people DO disagree with a video, and all I can see is the idiots that did. So frustrating.
I see the contest to find the world’s biggest cunt continues unabated.
What will they think of next week?
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.)
Adguard blocks YouTube ads on my laptop.
Smarttube blocks YT ads on my TV.
Revanced allows me to block YT ads on my phone.
But yeah, keep pushing adverts /s
i use adguard, but sometimes adguard will break some websites, so i just disable, and use privacy badger, ublock origin, or decentraleyes.
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.
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.
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.
Advertisers are invasive like zebra mussels.
