YouTube's new ad strategy is bound to upset users - Hypertext
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Peak Points place adverts at the point where users are most engaged in a YouTube video.

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.

  • @[email protected]English
    52•10 hours 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.

    • @[email protected]English
      21•13 hours 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.

      • @[email protected]English
        11•12 hours ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]English
          17•12 hours ago

          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…

          • @[email protected]English
            2•2 hours ago

            your phones also heats up, and then it gets slow. had to install adblockers to preserve the life of the phone batteries.

    • @[email protected]English
      6•11 hours ago

      Yeah let’s just do an ad break during the most interesting part of EVERY video. Sounds amazing… not

    • @[email protected]English
      3•11 hours ago

      Yes but… YouTube its maybe the One and only online service that have no competition so… They dont really care