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.
Use Freetube or Invidious, problem solved.
Only Freetube is being actively attacked by Google and Invidious is basically dead.
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.
For YouTube, viewers aren’t the users, advertisers are.
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…
Pretty wild seeing an ad for UL out in the wild in these comments, you an electrician?
I got my MTR in UL 508A a couple years ago
Architect, so in the neighborhood… I mostly interact with UL in the context of fire-rated assemblies, though.
Ahh my context is all related to industrial electrical systems. It gets really fun when UL and NFPA 79 start to conflict with each other.
your phones also heats up, and then it gets slow. had to install adblockers to preserve the life of the phone batteries.
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
firefox and uBlock Origin. I don’t see ads. Fuck Google and their AI.
How to ensure huge swathes of the population will never ever buy your product out of sheer spite
Not going to help when you have a monopoly over the user-generated content field like YT and by extension Google basically does.
On youtube, you’re not the customer. You’re the product being sold
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.
Imagine …
THIS IS SP…
Insert unskippable ad here.
ARTA!
Wow big congratulations to the corporate ghoul who thought this up. Thanks for making our world a shittier place.
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 just googled “how to lick a drill press” and sadly the AI response is that I shouldn’t do it because it’s dangerous. Keep trying!
Edit: lick not kick… But kicking is probably dangerous too
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 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.
Enough is never enough.
Enshittification
Willing to bet uBlock Origin will make it so I never see a single one of these ads.
Firefox forever.
And Revanced for android is just 😘🤌 chef’s kiss.
I’m a Newpipe man myself but Revanced is also fantastic.
Hey, Newpipe’s a banger too, just not what I found first. I fully support anything that takes away from Google’s profits
I use CleanTube, myself!
Cool, I’ll have a look!
Can you get it for iPhone?
I don’t have ios but I ran across this at some point trying to find a yt app for a friend. Been awhile since the last update so I’m not sure if it’s still effective and I can’t test it
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”.
Every day we get closer to the All-Despising Baby Skull.
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.
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.
