They don’t care. If the advertisers pay for that spot then they make money! This has been the story with TV ads for decades.
Comment on YouTube confirms your pause screen is now fair game for ads
KingJalopy@lemm.ee 1 month ago
Are they so dumb They don’t realize that when we pause a video we are likely not watching or even near our fucking phone or screen at that time?
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 month ago
bruhsoulz@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
They do, and they don’t care. The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they’ll get to play you more ads and cash out more. When/if they implement pause ads advertisers will have an even bigger case against against yt inflating ad watch time to make more money. Facebook has this issue as well.
hikaru755@lemmy.world 1 month ago
The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they’ll get to play you more ads and cash out more.
You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it’s just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn’t equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you’ll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you’re just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn’t really have an incentive to make it work like that, it’s just accidental.
Here’s the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI
bruhsoulz@lemmy.ml 1 month ago
Huh yea you’ve actually got a great point there. Also one of the YouTubers I watch is quite open about his knowledge on content creation and the algorithm and he once claimed yt knows when and to whom showing ads is beneficial, if you don’t mind sitting thru ads your supposedly more prone to get them, which is the reason why every time I’m using the official YouTube client for whatever reason I make sure to close and reopen the video as many times as it takes until I get it to start playing with no ads 😂 If that is true they’d def use that as an opportunity to roll out more ads cus no ones there to skip em
Draconic_NEO@lemmy.world 1 month ago
Advertising these days is less of a way to show people things and more of an infinite money glitch. Of course websites that serve ads will deny this vehemently because advertisers who become aware of such practices (typically known as click fraud) will cut off those websites from ad revenue very quickly and stop serving ads there.
The idea is to trick the advertising companies into thinking that we are there and we are watching, so that they will pay money.
Copernican@lemmy.world 1 month ago
It’s the opposite. If you pause the ad you the viewer are almost always looking at the screen. The pause button on a mobile phone or web browser is literally on the player. You are guaranteed to see it immediately after you push the button. You will see it when you in pause. These ads are display banners not video.
Unlike video ads that just auto play, especially when the video player auto plays more videos, there probably is more probability you aren’t actually watching, unlike pause ads that require user activity and focus on the screen to push the pause button.
Drusenija@lemmy.world 1 month ago
They do, they’re probably just hoping the advertisers don’t and keep paying for more ad space.