- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
- cross-posted to:
- Technology@programming.dev
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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I stopped using YouTube years ago. Fuck that shit.
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You can use it through chrome without ads sure but it works like hot garbage.
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I use it daily on Firefox on Linux and on Windows and on android using Revanced
It works exactly like YouTube but without ads and with sponsorblock
I checked out Revanced and it looks helpful thanks for that info.
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!!
Eh this needs to go in fuckai
EwTube underestimates a person’s primordial instinct to skip ads
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.
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.
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
Fwiw I kinda wanna see what awful slop their generative ai ads will be. Literally the first time in years I’ve been mildly interested to see an ad. Not that I’ll stop blocking ads to see them, but, mildly interested.
Yeah this would still hit 100% of ads that have happened before now. And all linear tv ads on streams. Seriously willing to build it if anyone wants to work on it with me. Pm me
“Netflix members pay as much attention to midroll ads as they do to the shows and movies themselves,” Amy Reinhard, president of advertising at Netflix, said, according to the publication.
This is so hilarious when you think about it.
Are their movies and shows so bad that people are watching ads with as much attention?
Or do they mean “pay as much attention” by ignoring the content altogether as they only run Netflix as background noise while they do something else?
😂
They very literally create shows and movies to be background noise and still be an understandable story. That’s why a lot of their originals are so bad if you sit down to watch them normally.
classifier model which labels the ads
Not exactly my idea as 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.
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.
You should pay off you don’t like the ads.
YT + Music is a fantastic value.
Queue a line of people screaming it’s trash while not being able to get over their addiction of the service.
Agree. I love my ad blockers and 🏴☠️ but I happily pay for YouTube because it’s given me so much over the years
Im with you on this. Ive had premium youtube since it was google music and I could upload my own mp3 collection. It is well worth the cost.
I will pay only when Google ensure that my data will not be used for any type of advertising or AI training (this obviously includes selling to third parties). Months ago I read around, I don’t know if it’s true, that even those with a premium account will see ads. If that proves true, it means I will never make the subscription. It’s pretty simple.
Then deal with the ads 🤷♂️
Or just use FreeTube lol
firefox and uBlock Origin. I don’t see ads. Fuck Google and their AI.
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.
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.
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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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.
Yes, I already do.
I asked because I don’t know if anyone who does use a Chromium browser has noticed an uptick in ads.
Don’t use a chromium based browser.
I did say I use Firefox. I was asking those who don’t.
Those who don’t use Firefox should.
Reading is hard. My advice still stands for everyone else though.
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My phone too
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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.
I agree, but it’s still the place to look first.
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.
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.
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.
But even running an indexer on a YT-like scale would need serious money, even if you spread the hosting and streaming load around. And for most users, this would not be attractive, as you probably would have to torrent the data first and view it later.
Then there is the issue with responsibility. If someone throws e.g. CSAM into the system, who could be held responsible? Who would have to deal with DMCA notices? Who would deal with issues like “Dictator X demands all videos showing him in a bad light to be removed immediately!”
And: Opening a payment system is a serious can of worms, especially if you need it to work internationally.
Honestly, I’m not against a YT alternative, but I don’t want it to die after three weeks because the person behind is was too optimistic to consider to potential problems.
But even running an indexer on a YT-like scale would need serious money, even if you spread the hosting and streaming load around.
True but probably doable since it would be way smaller.
And for most users, this would not be attractive, as you probably would have to torrent the data first and view it later.
That’s a good observation.
Then there is the issue with responsibility. If someone throws e.g. CSAM into the system, who could be held responsible?
The uploader. But I get that could be difficult.
Who would have to deal with DMCA notices?
Only the ones where the DMCA is valid. Which means US.
Who would deal with issues like “Dictator X demands all videos showing him in a bad light to be removed immediately!”
Do you realize that in many place such a request could be simply ignored until the dictator X does not get and order by a judge ?
Not to say that these are not real problems, but a distributed system is much more resilient to them, with the good and bad implications associated.And: Opening a payment system is a serious can of worms, especially if you need it to work internationally.
That’s a point that is more problematic since such system could|should not use something like paypal or similar services.
Yes, I agree.
It appears GNU Taler is seeing some initial deployments. That’s for payment system.
An index can have centralized control, while being itself decentralized. Like for checking certificates you don’t contact some CA website every time, you have a certificate chain, cryptographically verified. That’s for CSAM and DMCA notices. That center can deal with them, sending deletion notices signed with their certificate or whatever, or recalling index entries. Those would have to propagate over the network fast enough, of course.
That system just has to allow plugging in paid services in a uniform way. Then the serious money part will not be as important.
With torrents one can have sequential downloads, and again, with paid services one could have those having new publications faster and with better download speeds.
The word “uniform” is the only thing differentiating this from the Internet we already have.
With Taler I wait for it to work the kinks out. And, of course, for it to be available somewhere reasonable.
I’m in Russia, I’ll probably see Taler here only after Putin.
All this also doesn’t take into account how creators gets paid.
It’s a big system, with enough moving parts that I understand the ad/pay model existing. I just wish they weren’t such prices about how they choose to operate it sometimes.
All this also doesn’t take into account how creators gets paid.
If they want to make money in such system, they can simply host their node and use something like patreon to get paid.
(yes, there should be the option for a node to not be able to share a video and to stream it only to subscribed users, but that does not seems to be a big problem)
You’re right, cost of content creation comes on top of the running costs, too.
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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
