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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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[-] MagicShel@lemmy.zip 158 points 1 month 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.

[-] kami@lemmy.dbzer0.com 118 points 1 month ago
[-] FrostyPolicy@suppo.fi 63 points 1 month ago
[-] ceenote@lemmy.world 43 points 1 month ago
[-] Vanilla_PuddinFudge@infosec.pub 23 points 1 month ago

SmartTube

....yt-dlp

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[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 119 points 1 month 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.

[-] eager_eagle@lemmy.world 67 points 1 month ago

That's because it doesn't. Just don't tell the investors.

[-] Ulrich@feddit.org 24 points 1 month ago

At some point you would think the investors would get upset about all the lying...

[-] gwilikers@lemmy.ml 17 points 1 month ago

You know. I feel like its a bit obvious to say but a system where corporations are operated top-down by a group of individuals whose only interest is the profitability of said corporation with little to no consideration in other aspects of the corporation (the employees for one) is a pretty bad system. I remember reading that Henry Ford wanted to drop the price of the Model T to make it even more of an everyman car. Two of his top investors took him to court over it. This isn't to say Ford was some sort of paragon; but it strikes me sometime, the degree to which the naked greed of some people pierces the capitalist veil of competitive innovation for social betterment.

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[-] brucethemoose@lemmy.world 25 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Google’s been deploying engagement models before anyone even knew the name OpenAI.

This is oldschool machine learning, driven by viewing metrics from users. Gemini is just a brand.

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[-] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 90 points 1 month 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".

[-] YurkshireLad@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 month ago

And we’ll doom scroll through ads as though they’re shorts, which I guess they are anyway.

[-] TwistedCister@lemm.ee 16 points 1 month 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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[-] peanuts4life 70 points 1 month 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.

[-] golden_zealot@lemmy.ml 27 points 1 month ago

I love you. Please spread it fucking everywhere when you do.

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[-] ExistentialKiwi@lemmy.world 60 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month 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 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 24 points 1 month ago

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

[-] bitjunkie@lemmy.world 23 points 1 month 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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[-] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 43 points 1 month ago

Willing to bet uBlock Origin will make it so I never see a single one of these ads.

Firefox forever.

[-] Sturgist@lemmy.ca 22 points 1 month ago

And Revanced for android is just 😘🤌 chef's kiss.

https://revanced.app/

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[-] ExLisper@lemmy.curiana.net 36 points 1 month ago
[-] el_bhm@lemm.ee 16 points 1 month ago

When I have to visit it sans adblocker it is like a dumpster fire.

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[-] slaacaa@lemmy.world 32 points 1 month ago
[-] hightrix@lemmy.world 31 points 1 month ago

Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.

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

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[-] SnotFlickerman 30 points 1 month 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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Firefox X UBlock Origin X Sponsorblock X Bring Back Youtube Dislike. Thank fuck for those Devs.

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[-] MajesticElevator@lemmy.zip 26 points 1 month 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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[-] Taleya@aussie.zone 21 points 1 month ago

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

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[-] isaaclyman@lemmy.world 21 points 1 month 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 20 points 1 month 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 18 points 1 month 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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[-] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 17 points 1 month ago

Advertisers are invasive like zebra mussels.

[-] ShittyBeatlesFCPres@lemmy.world 17 points 1 month 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.

[-] roguesignal@lemm.ee 16 points 1 month ago

Enshittification

[-] lightnsfw@reddthat.com 16 points 1 month ago

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

[-] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 16 points 1 month 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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this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
937 points (100.0% liked)

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