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.
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 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.
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.
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
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
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?
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.
the only way they do is, do what twitch does, but its prohibitively expensive to do that. something about putting the ad inside the video coding?
I block ads on Twitch too.
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 do! I’m actually using an NVidia Shield. Which runs android TV
I tried last year to install a recommended one but it required that I download a third-party APK. And I would have to jump through a meant hoops to be able to install it on this device when I was poking around then. If it’s not on the Play store, apparently it’s rather difficult to install?
You’re right in that you’d have to install an APK, from outside of the Play Store, however if you’re aware of the right sources of the right apps your security should be fine (you can disable the ability to install apps from unknown sources after you’ve got the YouTube alternative app, without affecting it, if you’re worried about that).
There are a few steps, which are usually straight forward, listed here: https://github.com/yuliskov/SmartTube
If you follow that link it should have further links for an installation tutorial (they also link a YouTube tutorial to make things easier).
If you do go down that route, it’s a much more pleasant experience imho. No ads, Sponsorblock for in-video ad segments, complete control over quality of video, audio, options to manually force specific codecs, etc.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It might be something they’re testing. I had it and then it went away for a bit and now its back. I emulate android on my PC just so I can use an app that has no ads.
Make sure your ublock lists are up to date, sometimes the extension gets a bit stuck and needs a nudge to update them.
It’s an arms race and Google hasn’t won it yet.
