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.

  • resipsaloquitur@lemm.eeEnglish
    617·
    17 days ago

    Yeaaaahhh, not feeling Marc Andreessen and the uptick in spying and upselling coming from the Mozilla foundation lately.

    • hagelslager@feddit.nlEnglish
      38·
      17 days ago

      Then go for it’s forks Waterfox or Librewolf?

      Brave is tied to Peter Thiel, the other PayPal cunt using his wealth to make the world worse.

        • hagelslager@feddit.nlEnglish
          2·
          16 days ago

          PayPal is a merge of Confinity (where Thiel is one of the founders for) and X.com (another online financials company at that time, and we all know who is obsessed with X).

    • MudMan@fedia.io
      262·
      17 days ago

      And your alternative is the cryptobro farm Chromium skin?

      I mean, we’re grading on a curve, I guess, but… I think I’m sticking with FF for now.

      Man, branding and PR are weird.

      • resipsaloquitur@lemm.eeEnglish
        28·
        17 days ago

        https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/28/opinion/marc-andreessen-manifesto-techno-optimism.html:

        In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few. As for the rest of us — the unwashed masses, people who have either “unskilled” jobs or useless liberal arts degrees or both — we exist mostly as automatons whose entire value is measured in productivity.

        Seems like a nice guy. 👍

        • hagelslager@feddit.nlEnglish
          151·
          17 days ago

          Brandon Eich and Peter Thiel are also very questionable folk. If you prefer to stick with a Chromium, may I recommend Vivaldi? It’s made by people involved in old Opera (before that became a chromium skin as well).

          • MudMan@fedia.io
            21·
            17 days ago

            Did not know Thiel was an investor, actually. If we’re judging software based on the personality of people we’ve read random crap about in the press then that’d indeed be disqualifying.

            However, I’d argue maybe that’s not a great way to pretend you have any agency in an aggressively oligopolistic environment.

            We may need to stop making choices based on knee-jerk personality-driven branding crap and start focusing on systemic issues. Just… you know, as a species.

            • hagelslager@feddit.nlEnglish
              3·
              17 days ago

              Unfortunately, as long as our species put abstract and overall pretty useless concepts such as wealth before survival and basic decency towards each other, I don’t think we ever tackle systematic issues.

    • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
      92·
      17 days ago

      https://librewolf.net/

      That’s what I would go with, personally, because it’s at least helping keep one alternative browser base alive instead of giving Google the entire ecosystem of everything being based on Chromium. But that’s just me.