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.
Wow big congratulations to the corporate ghoul who thought this up. Thanks for making our world a shittier place.
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.
Any product that advertises on YT is one I avoid
The actual ads I don’t have any strong feelings about, the ones sponsoring creators are the ones I look at sideways.
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.
Am I the only one still not seeing ads on YT with Ublock?
YT becoming shittier and shittier with ads is why I’ve changed to downloaders instead. No ads.
n
i dont see any ads either. but sometimes the content creators themselves will “promote, advertise for the companies”
Right when the guitar solo hits
Eh this needs to go in fuckai
Why can’t they just place the ad at the beginning of the video, Spotify gives you X free uninterrupted songs to listen to after listening to 1,2 adds. Why can’t they just follow that model
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.
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