YouTube's new ad strategy is bound to upset users: YouTube Peak Points utilise Gemini to identify moments where users will be most engaged, so advertisers can place ads at the point.

Submitted ⁨⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Pro@programming.dev⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://htxt.co.za/2025/05/youtubes-new-ad-strategy-is-bound-to-upset-users/

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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MagicShel@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  laughs in uBlock Origin
  
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  - FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Laughs in FreeTube.
    
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  - podperson@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    laughs in invidious. google doesn’t even get to know I’m watching anything
    
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- Gullible@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t YouTube still running year over year at a loss?
  
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  - billiam0202@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I mean it must be? The only income it has is based on ads from Google.
    
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- TachyonTele@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I guess that’s what happens when you hit the top minds from yahoo
  
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Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- eager_eagle@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s because it doesn’t. Just don’t tell the investors.
  
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  - Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    At some point you would think the investors would get upset about all the lying…
    
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- brucethemoose@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Google’s been deploying engagement models before anyone even knew the name OpenAI.
  
  This is oldschool machine learning. Gemini is just a brand.
  
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- half@lemy.lol ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    That’s not AI.
    
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  - acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    logical expressions have been the foundation of computing since the beginning. you are using a definition of “AI” that is completely divorced from that history.
    
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- LastYearsIrritant@sopuli.xyz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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- mctoasterson@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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
  
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  - TwistedCister@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Or stand up specials. So much comedy on YouTube and they just drop Dick Pills ^TM^ commercials in the middle of punchlines.
    
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- RowRowRowYourBot@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  [deleted]
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  - Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    …no? It doesn’t.
    
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golden_zealot@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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”.

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- YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  And we’ll doom scroll through ads as though they’re shorts, which I guess they are anyway.
  
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  - TwistedCister@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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  - Jarix@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Isn’t that called Facebook?
    
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- Rin@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Mfs will try to turn my phone into an electronic billboard.
  
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- GraniteM@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Every day we get closer to the All-Despising Baby Skull.
  
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- Ledericas@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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peanuts4life@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- golden_zealot@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I love you. Please spread it fucking everywhere when you do.
  
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- rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - teuniac_@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    since ads are always repeat
    
    For now. Netflix announced generative AI ads for 2026
    
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- MrLLM@ani.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  classifier model which labels the ads
  
  Not exactly my idea, 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.
  
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ExistentialKiwi@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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 absorbed and engaging with a video, and be happy that they were interrupted to be served an ad? Sounds like a great formula for pissing off your users.

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- essteeyou@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  For YouTube, viewers aren’t the users, advertisers are.
  
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- bitjunkie@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - JcbAzPx@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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- Razzazzika@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yeah let’s just do an ad break during the most interesting part of EVERY video. Sounds amazing… not
  
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- Ithorian@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Yes but… YouTube its maybe the One and only online service that have no competition so… They dont rally care
  
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Coolbeanschilly@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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- billiam0202@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I use Firefox. Is Ublock Origin still effective on YouTube since Google shoved out Manifest V3 onto Chromium-based browsers?
  
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  - calcopiritus@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Firefox is not chromium based. You can install unlock origin and have no ads.
    
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  - FurtiveFugitive@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Don’t use a chromium based browser.
    
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- Z3k3@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  My phone too
  
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infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Willing to bet uBlock Origin will make it so I never see a single one of these ads.

Firefox forever.

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- Sturgist@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  And Revanced for android is just 😘🤌 chef’s kiss.
  
  revanced.app
  
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  - infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’m a Newpipe man myself but Revanced is also fantastic.
    
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  - mrslt@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I use CleanTube, myself!
    
    Linky
    
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  - knexcar@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Can you get it for iPhone?
    
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ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Youtube has ads?

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- el_bhm@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  When I have to visit it sans adblocker it is like a dumpster fire.
  
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  - sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Yeah, if Google ever effectively blocks/bypasses my ad blocker, I’ll stop watching. They charge too much for premium for how much I watch, and I’d rather go without than deal with all those ads.
    
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- douglasg14b@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  On my tv, yes :(
  
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  - Ulrich@feddit.org ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Try SmartTube Next
    
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  - spudsrus@aussie.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    What brand?
    
    I recently encountered tizenbrew.
    
    So worth installing
    
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  - JadenSmith@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Do you have the option to install Android apps onto your TV? Or if it has another OS with the option?
    
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slaacaa@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Image

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hightrix@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.

Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.

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- dr_robotBones@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It doesn’t make the “turn off your adblock” popup go away though.
  
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  - samus12345@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I’ve never seen that. YMMV, I guess.
    
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- PhAzE@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  And revanced youtube for android does the same.
  
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SnotFlickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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- CalipherJones@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That’s a task for a different administration.
  
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Zealousideal_Fox_900@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Firefox X UBlock Origin X Sponsorblock X Bring Back Youtube Dislike. Thank fuck for those Devs.

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- Underwaterbob@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  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.
  
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  - Zealousideal_Fox_900@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Why use Gemini and AI when they already have a feature in youtube where they show the “most watched moments”…?

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- desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  because immidiately after sponsor segments are frequently watched more than once, as are walls of text.
  
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  - captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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)
    
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  - MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I don’t get what you wrote
    
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Blackmist@feddit.uk ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I see the contest to find the world’s biggest cunt continues unabated.

What will they think of next week?

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Taleya@aussie.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
How to ensure huge swathes of the population will never ever buy your product out of sheer spite

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- LifeOfChance@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
  
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isaaclyman@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.)

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SomeAwfulBitch@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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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match@pawb.social ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
That’s definitely a different ML classifier than what Gemini is currently doing. Is Google just using the brand Gemini to mean “any ML system provided by Google”?

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guyoverthere123@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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

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melsaskca@lemmy.ca ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Advertisers are invasive like zebra mussels.

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roguesignal@lemm.ee ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Enshittification

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flop_leash_973@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Because nothing endears your platform to users like throwing ads in their face during the high points of whatever they are watching.

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KingOogaBooga@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
firefox and uBlock Origin. I don’t see ads. Fuck Google and their AI.

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lightnsfw@reddthat.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Just imagine coming up with shit like this being the only job you can find and not jumping off a building instead.

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Gronk@aussie.zone ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Migrated away from Google because they’re just genuinely useless.

Search results are infested with AI bullshit and SEO slop, can’t actually search for anything useful unless you know the website you’re looking for, in which case I just go to the website directly.

Youtube curates a selection of completely irrelevant videos to try to shove ads down your throat, I still have to change my user agent string every time because YouTube throws a hissy fit at firefox with ublock.

Gmail is pretty much the same as any other email provider but comes at the expense of your data being sold for advertising purposes.

Don’t even get me started on the shit show that is Android.

I run GrapheneOS, Fedora and debian, self host what I can and use decent providers for what I can’t. I’m the furthest away from the big tech corps than I’ve ever been and it feels great to have computers that actually compute and not serve me useless fucking ad drivel.

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AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Because they want viewers to associate the products in these ads with feelings of annoyance and frustration?

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ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
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.

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rottingleaf@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
They mean - maximize irritation? Put ads in the most obnoxious way?

There’s a good global task for FOSS alternatives of YouTube and other places where life happens.

A decentralized scraper. Something similar to SETI@home, or that hentai analog for storage. So that based on some metric YT content would be divided between users willing to contribute their machines and accounts to scraping YT (a bit similar to searching DHT, and probably some kind of DHT would be useful), and then they’d download that and re-publish in some p2p alternative.

TBH probably also good for that little of the web that is still possible to represent as static pages and browse via links.

The issue is that alternatives lack content, and the closed nature of proprietary services gives them an advantage - there is content there which doesn’t exist outside of them.

And people just reuploading by hand what they themselves consider interesting are a little fraction of the majority that doesn’t bother.

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Fizz@lemmy.nz ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Wow big congratulations to the corporate ghoul who thought this up. Thanks for making our world a shittier place.

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antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨5⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
They already did something similar back in the day. I remember watching a music video some ~10 years ago where they placed an ad like five seconds before the end of the song, right at the musical climax, ruining the mood with surgical precision. I was absolutely infuriated and went off to Google wondering if there’s a way to block ads. And the rest is history.

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