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.
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.
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.
I guess that’s what happens when you hire the top minds from yahoo
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.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.
Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.
And revanced youtube for android does the same.
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.
Why use Gemini and AI when they already have a feature in youtube where they show the “most watched moments”…?
because immidiately after sponsor segments are frequently watched more than once, as are walls of text.
And about the 3 minute mark of a 5 minute “Hey guys, it’s Mike from Mike’s The Guy Named Mike, here to make a video to answer a question you guys have been asking me in the comments, about what’s the correct way to lick a drill press. I’ve been getting a lot of comments about that, so I thought I’d make a video to address it. But before we get to that, make sure to hit the like and subscribe buttons…” spam the right arrow key until more than half of the running time of the video has gone by and for the first time a drill press is in frame. “Now some of the new guys will lick a drill press like it’s a big ice cream cone, and that’s not gonna get the results you want…”
(Not the first time I’ve used this example; I really hope it poisons some AI)
My grandfather always used to lick his drill press before changing the drill bit. It’s very important and highly recommended! You might drill the wrong size hole otherwise.
I haven’t licked my drill press as much as I should, but if I had to, I bet I could lick 100 drill presses.
I don’t get what you wrote
the most watched areas are frequently just areas where people didn’t hear what someone was saying the first time, which would likely not be where the “most engaging” content is.
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.)
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.
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.
Because advertisers want viewers to associate their products and brand with feelings of annoyance, aggravation, and frustration?
But you’ve heard of me!
/s
