this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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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.

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[–] LordCrom@lemmy.world 11 points 14 hours ago

Imagine ...

THIS IS SP....

Insert unskippable ad here.

ARTA!

[–] KingOogaBooga@lemmy.world 10 points 14 hours ago

firefox and uBlock Origin. I don't see ads. Fuck Google and their AI.

[–] XnxCuX@lemmy.world 4 points 11 hours ago

Eh this needs to go in fuckai

[–] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 15 points 15 hours ago

Just imagine coming up with shit like this being the only job you can find and not jumping off a building instead.

[–] Zealousideal_Fox_900@lemmy.dbzer0.com 26 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

Firefox X UBlock Origin X Sponsorblock X Bring Back Youtube Dislike. Thank fuck for those Devs.

[–] Underwaterbob@lemm.ee 8 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Taleya@aussie.zone 21 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

How to ensure huge swathes of the population will never ever buy your product out of sheer spite

[–] LifeOfChance@lemmy.world 9 points 18 hours ago

That number is still SIGNIFICANTLY less than those who won't do anything. Us using ad blockers doesn't even account for a percentage of what they rake in from those without them.

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 9 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago) (2 children)

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?

[–] Mniot@programming.dev 13 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 3 points 13 hours ago

considering thier Pixels are heavily devoting most of its resources to AI solely, while neglecting all the other hardware.

[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 7 points 15 hours ago (2 children)

30 year old phone

I'd like to see you try:

[–] GenosseFlosse@feddit.org 2 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

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.

[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago

Done, but the dial up is going to take a while for the reply

[–] ExistentialKiwi@lemmy.world 54 points 1 day ago* (last edited 20 hours ago) (4 children)

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.

[–] essteeyou@lemmy.world 18 points 21 hours ago

For YouTube, viewers aren't the users, advertisers are.

[–] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 22 points 23 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JcbAzPx@lemmy.world 11 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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.

[–] Thrashy@lemmy.world 18 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

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…

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 2 points 12 hours ago

your phones also heats up, and then it gets slow. had to install adblockers to preserve the life of the phone batteries.

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[–] gradual@lemmings.world 10 points 18 hours ago

Enough is never enough.

[–] Fizz@lemmy.nz 12 points 19 hours ago

Wow big congratulations to the corporate ghoul who thought this up. Thanks for making our world a shittier place.

[–] kadup@lemmy.world 6 points 16 hours ago

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.

[–] MITM0@lemmy.world 1 points 11 hours ago

EwTube underestimates a person's primordial instinct to skip ads

[–] BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world 7 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

Any product that advertises on YT is one I avoid

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 2 points 14 hours ago

The actual ads I don't have any strong feelings about, the ones sponsoring creators are the ones I look at sideways.

[–] slaacaa@lemmy.world 33 points 1 day ago
[–] ssfckdt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 5 points 18 hours ago (3 children)

Am I the only one still not seeing ads on YT with Ublock?

[–] r_deckard@lemmy.world 4 points 15 hours ago

YT becoming shittier and shittier with ads is why I've changed to downloaders instead. No ads.

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 1 points 12 hours ago

n

i dont see any ads either. but sometimes the content creators themselves will "promote, advertise for the companies"

Same here. Ublock Origin for the win!

[–] guyoverthere123@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 points 1 day ago (1 children)

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

[–] Ledericas@lemm.ee 2 points 12 hours ago

i use adguard, but sometimes adguard will break some websites, so i just disable, and use privacy badger, ublock origin, or decentraleyes.

[–] SomeAwfulBitch@lemm.ee 21 points 1 day ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] Ravenfreak@discuss.online 3 points 17 hours ago (1 children)

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...

[–] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 4 points 14 hours ago

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.

[–] roguesignal@lemm.ee 16 points 1 day ago

Enshittification

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