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.

Eh this needs to go in fuckai

Imagine ...
THIS IS SP....
Insert unskippable ad here.
ARTA!

firefox and uBlock Origin. I don't see ads. Fuck Google and their AI.

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

Firefox X UBlock Origin X Sponsorblock X Bring Back Youtube Dislike. Thank fuck for those Devs.
- 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.
  
  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.

EwTube underestimates a person's primordial instinct to skip ads

Why do you need "AI" for this? That is something that can be done client side on a 30 year old phone without sweat if you already have a list of timestamps and number of engagements for a video?
- I was at Google when they announced that only AI-related projects would be able to request increased budget. I don't know if they're still doing that specifically, but I'm sure they are still massively incentivizing teams to slap an "AI Inside" sticker on everything.
  
  considering thier Pixels are heavily devoting most of its resources to AI solely, while neglecting all the other hardware.
- 30 year old phone
  I'd like to see you try:
  
  This task is not that complicated. You have a list of timestamps with the seconds and the number of interactions for that second. All you need to do is to find the seconds with the most interactions. On a 1h video this would be only 3600 calculations "if currentValue is greater than maxValue". If you store it as a Plain integer array you would need ~14KB of RAM. For comparison, a 1987 homecomputer with a 68000 CPU would do ~7Million calculations per second and have ~512kB of RAM, depending on the options.
  
  Done, but the dial up is going to take a while for the reply

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

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.

Enough is never enough.

Wow big congratulations to the corporate ghoul who thought this up. Thanks for making our world a shittier place.

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.
- 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

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.

So I'm sure this will just cause more people to use Ublock and other ad blocking services if that one fails. Maybe this will cause more people to look into making their own Peertube instances. But who am I kidding, normies usually don't like hosting communities themselves...
- Maybe this will cause more people to look into making their own Peertube instances. But who am I kidding, normies usually don't like hosting communities themselves...
  The "normies" don't even know what that means. I get this platform is full of techy people and out of touch with the typical technology user, but Holy shit this is on a whole different level.

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

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"
- Same here. Ublock Origin for the win!

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
- i use adguard, but sometimes adguard will break some websites, so i just disable, and use privacy badger, ublock origin, or decentraleyes.

Right when the guitar solo hits

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.

Enshittification

I see the contest to find the world's biggest cunt continues unabated.
What will they think of next week?

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)
  
  I don't get what you wrote

LOL. Like every tech story from the US is about enshittification. too funny.

I've been noticing lately that 800lb Gorilla specials have been cutting to ads right between the setup and punchline of a bit. Mad fucking annoying.

Advertisers are invasive like zebra mussels.

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.

It would be wrong to call it a replacement, but this is a good place to plug !peertube@lemmy.world - there's more quality content on there than many might suspect, especially if you are into FOSS and people tinkering with stuff they are passionate about.

I am used to listening to streams while walking, but I've been noticing the most annoying ads pop-up when I'm interested in something they are saying. This isn't going to make me pay attention to those ads, it's going to drive me to the plethora of other services I can use. The worst thing about it is that it doesn't even pause and cache the stream, meaning that if I was listening to something interesting, the ad just causes me to miss it. Google just keeps eating its own tail.

Google enshitifying things? Who would have thought? Seriously, it's as if they want to test how far they can go upsetting users. There's got to be some (a lot?) of that, for sure.
- they enshittfyied thier phones, with the AI-bs on thier chips, the exoynys. which is inferior to the other flagship chips or phones.
- You'd think so, but a never ending stream of people continue to sit there glued to their phones through content and adverts alike.
  We're probably already at the Demolition Man point of having a station just for adverts.

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.
- alternatives lack content
  Maybe I'm old or smthing, but for the past years content on yt mostly sucks.
  Few interesting and original channels and then galaxy of reacts to, recaps and AI garbage slop reading Reddit.
  
  Our YouTube experiences are vastly different. Their algorithm frustrates me because it consistently serves up interesting videos I want to watch when I open the app to seek out something specific. My Watch Later playlist has become huge.
  
  Yes, there's a lot of crap, but there's also a lot of great content. That's what happens when you're basically the only game in town, you get basically all the content.
  
  I agree, but it's still the place to look first.
- The core problem is that hosting and streaming videos costs money, and that money must come from somewhere. Unless there is someone with really deep pockets just paying for everything, such a platform must use subscriptions or ads to make some money. Netflix & others use subscriptions, YouTube uses ads, and both even offer combo models.
  How would a free variant of YouTube work on the long run? Setting up a small model on a server in your home office, maybe with donations to cover initial hardware costs is not the issue at first, but once you need a computer center and employees you'll need some serious, regular money coming in.
  
  How would a free variant of YouTube work on the long run?
  Some options:
  charge channels for hosting costs - most channels make more from sponsorships, patreon, and merch than ads; could even be free for smaller channels
  charge customers for premium features - like Discord Nitro; they already have this in the form of super chats or whatever
  
  We've had bittorrent for many years.
  The issue is creating a global index and dedicating some storage to the less popular (at the moment) data.
  One can have paid storage provided over such a network, available only to subscribers. So you want to fetch a video from the global index, there are no peers having it online for free or their upload speed it atrocious, but there are some offering it not for free. You choose them and download, or maybe you have something like trade and auctions automation in MMORPGs - setting for auto-purchase and auto-sale with caps for what you would pay.
  That requires a payment system, though, that one can seamlessly connect to identities in such a network.

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.
  https://revanced.app/
  
  Can you get it for iPhone?
  
  I'm a Newpipe man myself but Revanced is also fantastic.
  
  I use CleanTube, myself!
  Linky

Youtube has ads?
- When I have to visit it sans adblocker it is like a dumpster fire.
  
  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.
- On my tv, yes :(
  
  Try SmartTube Next
  
  What brand?
  I recently encountered tizenbrew.
  So worth installing
  
  Do you have the option to install Android apps onto your TV? Or if it has another OS with the option?

I am a YUGE fan of FreeTube, a cross-platform YT client for the desktop. You can subscribe to channels, create, save, import, and export playlists...and no. Ads. Tis the bees knees.
And just a friendly reminder to donate to your favorite FOSS projects.
- THIS IS AWESOME, THANK YOU!
  (Apologies for my capslock, but I really am stoked.)
  Link to FreeTube.io download page

Uninstall Gemini! Oh you can't.... Linux phones, this is bullshit!
- i just dont use it to look up anything. and disabled thier playstore app, because apparent they also secretely download a spyware app on your phone too.

I've met some people who ask why I care so much about not having to see ads. They don't care if there's youtube ads every now and then. At this point they have to care.

YouTube really likes to just destroy itself huh?
- it started the moment they stop moderating Right wing propaganda.

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"?
- Yes, Gemini is their "AI" brand.

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?
- 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.

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.
- That's because it doesn't. Just don't tell the investors.
  
  At some point you would think the investors would get upset about all the lying...
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
  
  Or stand up specials. So much comedy on YouTube and they just drop Dick Pills ^TM commercials in the middle of punchlines.
- 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
  
  conditional and logical expressions have been the foundation of computing since the very beginning. you are using a definition of "AI" that is completely divorced from that history.
  
  That's not AI.
- ...no? It doesn't.

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.
- laughs in uBlock Origin
  
  Laughs in FreeTube.
  
  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.
  
  laughs in invidious. google doesn't even get to know I'm watching anything
- 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.
  
  https://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.
  
  I mean it must be? The only income it has is based on ads from Google.
- I guess that's what happens when you hire the top minds from yahoo

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.
- 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 hogging the GPU.
- 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

Because nothing endears your platform to users like throwing ads in their face during the high points of whatever they are watching.
- It has worked for them for years. It’s just more targeted now.

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.
- on my ironfox mobile browser, i could not use google, because i dont know how to get around thier recaptcha, it was asking everytime i opened the browser, so i just use duckduck go instead.
- Are you me? It sounds like you're me, but ahead of the journey.
  Already on Graphene and Linux (openSUSE in my case) and considering starting to self-host myself.
  I think in the short term this is the only solution to escape the garbage that the internet has become.
- I have a Google account specifically for logging into YouTube. I've aggressively used the like/hide channel/not interested in this video options to force it to actually show me what I want. It took quite a while to train it, but my YouTube homepage is actually nice right now.
  But every so often I'll go on YouTube logged out and it's like staring into the sun. The top videos that it pushes seem like brain melting garbage.
  Strangely I haven't had any issues with Firefox+Ublock+Sponsorblock. The way YouTube interacts with seemingly the same sets of software for different people is baffling.
  
  I’ve gone the opposite route. I never log in, and remove all cookies. I almost always use an incognito tab for YouTube. I’m a new visitor to them every time, in as much as that’s possible. I use bookmarks to go back to creators I want to see, and occasionally check them. No subscriptions either, which may suck for the creator, but at least they get my views.
  
  i dont log into to youtube most of the time, just draws unnessary attention, from other users.

Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.
Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.
- And revanced youtube for android does the same.
- It doesn't make the "turn off your adblock" popup go away though.
  
  I've never seen that. YMMV, I guess.

Gemini also being forced on me more and more in Android. Seriously considering a linux phone next.
- I've been hoping for one for some time, but it wouldn't be a smooth sailing even if everything was perfect. Get a pixel, install grapheneos and see if you can cope with it. I've been running it for a year now - lack of decent map app is my biggest issue that's left. Waze is great for driving, but useless for everything else; it's also owned by google. Most other apps are just reskinned google maps and don't even load without gapps.
  And I'm a sysadmin. My degoogling journey began in 2018-2019 with running my own nextcloud for files, photo backup, contact and calendar sync, as well as my own email server. All that to say that I've had it fairly easy to ditch play store on a phone, but that's not what most will experience.
  
  In the beginning I used OsmAnd for maps, its a bit wonky sometimes but the maps are high quality. Magic Earth fixed the the wonky ness but uses osm maps, is pretty great visually pleasing and can do all sorts of settings like speed assistance, lane assistance. I haven't used it much but Organic Map looks good too, seems to have a focus on public transportation.
  What do you do for calendar sync? I found I had to use an extension like DAVx⁵ to synchronize them to my phone, did you find another way?
- If it's anything like Linux desktop the apps you really need (for me, WhatsApp) are going to be available in 10 years. After that it's a short slide to "if you don't have Linux (why not?) by the way here's how to install on android/iOS if you must."
  At least that's my experience as an early Linux on desktop adopter. Yes Linux is a niche thing in mobile at the moment but the truth is the developers are the ones who make it happen and they are already there.

OK let's all skip to the middle of sponsor segments so the ads cover the sponsor segment. Win win
- The ads don't cover anything though, the video continues where it stopped before the ads.
  
  That's fine though, because the important parts of the video will not have the interruption then.
  You'd be skipping over the sponsor segments anyway

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.)
- You could use alternatives if you specifically want some videos. Grayjay can play videos from multiple platforms.

uBlock Origin zaps all of the ads for me on my laptop.
- My phone too
- I use Firefox. Is Ublock Origin still effective on YouTube since Google shoved out Manifest V3 onto Chromium-based browsers?
  
  Firefox is not chromium based. You can install unlock origin and have no ads.
  
  Don't use a chromium based browser.
  
  It works for me, yes. At least on Windows 11. Forgive my technical ineptitude.

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.
- That's a task for a different administration.
- They don't have that authority‽
  
  There's been this tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats at the FCC for like a solid decade or more now about whether the internet is classified as a "communications service" or an "information service." If it's classified as a communications service then the FCC has regulatory authority and can do things like enforce net neutrality. If it's classified as an information service, then the Federal Comminications Commission does not have authority to regulate it. The Biden FCC had been working to bring back net neutrality, but all that is pretty much out the window with a GOP toady in charge of the FCC now.
  It really needs to be codified by congress to have sticking power for it to be regulated by the FCC or the tug-of-war for how to refulate the internet will continue indefinitely.

I don't know how people watch YouTube with ads. Premium or ad blocker, otherwise it's a nightmare.
- It's like 15 seconds every couple of videos. I mean I get it, but TV my entire childhood was 21 minute shows with 3 sets of 3 minute ads per 30 min block. Movies that were 90 minutes would stretch to 2-2.5 hours with the ads. I saw Titanic once and it was closing in on 5 hours. It's really not that bad to me.

Ublock Origin in a Firefox fork and PipePipe with Sponsorblock on mobile. I'm perfectly ready to just export/delete my Youtube account and move on if it stops working.
- im using ironfox and fennec on mobile. and use ublock origin, adguard, and privacy badger.

No one will even blink at ads on most engaging moments in Youtube videos, in Pornhub ones tho....

I stopped using YouTube years ago. Fuck that shit.
- I use YT and have not seen an ad in years. I do not understand people who have not disabled ads.
  
  You can use it through chrome without ads sure but it works like hot garbage.
- Most of my favorite channels are on nebula now anyway. Just need Technology Connections and Mark Rober (my kids LOVE Mark Rober) to make the jump.
  
  I’ve been meaning to try nebula, that lifetime membership sounds hella great!!

Because advertisers want viewers to associate their products and brand with feelings of annoyance, aggravation, and frustration?
- But you've heard of me!
  /s