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.
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.
Just imagine coming up with shit like this being the only job you can find and not jumping off a building instead.
firefox and uBlock Origin. I don’t see ads. Fuck Google and their AI.
Imagine …
THIS IS SP…
Insert unskippable ad here.
ARTA!
Enough is never enough.
Why do you need “AI” for this? That is something that can be done client side on a 30 year old phone without sweat if you already have a list of timestamps and number of engagements for a video?
I was at Google when they announced that only AI-related projects would be able to request increased budget. I don’t know if they’re still doing that specifically, but I’m sure they are still massively incentivizing teams to slap an “AI Inside” sticker on everything.
considering thier Pixels are heavily devoting most of its resources to AI solely, while neglecting all the other hardware.
30 year old phone
I’d like to see you try:
Done, but the dial up is going to take a while for the reply
This task is not that complicated. You have a list of timestamps with the seconds and the number of interactions for that second. All you need to do is to find the seconds with the most interactions. On a 1h video this would be only 3600 calculations “if currentValue is greater than maxValue”. If you store it as a Plain integer array you would need ~14KB of RAM. For comparison, a 1987 homecomputer with a 68000 CPU would do ~7Million calculations per second and have ~512kB of RAM, depending on the options.
A guy I know started selling AI push notifications.
Your app signs up for his service, and he uses what’s essentially ChatGPT to find the best time slot to send you custom push notifications. That’s just his third party service working with limited data and system access.
Just imagine when Google and Apple start selling that as a service integrated to the OS.
Eh this needs to go in fuckai
Use Freetube or Invidious, problem solved.
Only Freetube is being actively attacked by Google and Invidious is basically dead.
Use NewPipe or its forks
So I’m sure this will just cause more people to use Ublock and other ad blocking services if that one fails. Maybe this will cause more people to look into making their own Peertube instances. But who am I kidding, normies usually don’t like hosting communities themselves…
Maybe this will cause more people to look into making their own Peertube instances. But who am I kidding, normies usually don’t like hosting communities themselves…
The “normies” don’t even know what that means. I get this platform is full of techy people and out of touch with the typical technology user, but Holy shit this is on a whole different level.
EwTube underestimates a person’s primordial instinct to skip ads
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 FreeTube.
… Revanced
SmartTube
…yt-dlp
I just pay for premium. Worth every penny with the amount of YouTube we watch.
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!
Ya @cattywampas@lemm.ee let’s send them complaints on this
They gotta give us a way to watch adfree without spying on us
Plus the first-party app is atrocious. The third party ones are way better.
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.
You’re right, of course, however as consumers we’re put into the position of having to support an absolutely atrocious corporate surveillance company AND creators, or neither. Creators are entangling themselves that way. Given the option, I will choose the latter every time. When creators want to make their content available on other platforms, I do support them there.
Money paid to Google also goes to supporting Project Nimbus, which is why Google is on the BDS list.
minor krill issue
I’m with you, paying is better than supporting the Ad business.
I just wish YouTube did not treat paying customers like criminals with the app based restrictions.
Why pay when there’s a free option?
The free option is not sustainable and does not reward the correct customer/business relationship.
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 invidious. google doesn’t even get to know I’m watching anything
No, I want them to know. Tell Cersei I did it.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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
Or stand up specials. So much comedy on YouTube and they just drop Dick Pills TM commercials in the middle of punchlines.
isn’t that just very basic timestamps like every 10 minutes or whatever?
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.
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.
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?
😂
They very literally create shows and movies to be background noise and still be an understandable story. That’s why a lot of their originals are so bad if you sit down to watch them normally.
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
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.
classifier model which labels the ads
Not exactly my idea as 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.
