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.
Youtube has ads?
When I have to visit it sans adblocker it is like a dumpster fire.
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.
Cool, I’ll have a look!
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
Gemini also being forced on me more and more in Android. Seriously considering a linux phone next.
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.
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.
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”?
Youtube… Youtube… Oh, yes, I remember Youtube. That was fun to use half a decade ago or so.
I don’t know how people watch YouTube with ads. Premium or ad blocker, otherwise it’s a nightmare.
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.
Firefox + uBlock origin
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.
No one will even blink at ads on most engaging moments in Youtube videos, in Pornhub ones tho…
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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.
Wow. Fuuuuuuuuck YouTube.
Also, Firefox plus Ublock Origin makes ads on YouTube go away.
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.
And revanced youtube for android does the same.
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”.
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.
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?
I don’t know, I don’t have a Facebook account. But I can believe you’re right.
Mfs will try to turn my phone into an electronic billboard.
