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.
This is fucking hilariously evil and short-sighted.
You just described end-stage capitalism
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
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
Nah, don’t pay Google with money or data. They already have enough.
Nah, I don’t like ads. Too much work to play cat and mouse over ad blockers.
I have installed uBlockOrigin once and have literally not done any configuring since then. Not a really good cat it seems.
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 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!!
Gemini also being forced on me more and more in Android. Seriously considering a linux phone next.
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.
In the beginning I used OsmAnd for maps, its a bit wonky sometimes but the maps are high quality. Magic Earth fixed the the wonky ness but uses osm maps, is pretty great visually pleasing and can do all sorts of settings like speed assistance, lane assistance. I haven’t used it much but Organic Map looks good too, seems to have a focus on public transportation.
What do you do for calendar sync? I found I had to use an extension like DAVx⁵ to synchronize them to my phone, did you find another way?
I’ll give Magic Earth a go, but osmand is just missing a bunch of stuff I got used to having I guess. The actual map part is fine.
I use DAVx⁵ myself. It’s not ideal aesthetically, but honestly not a thing I worry about.
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.
Imagine …
THIS IS SP…
Insert unskippable ad here.
ARTA!
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.
THIS IS AWESOME, THANK YOU!
(Apologies for my capslock, but I really am stoked.)
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.
Right when the guitar solo hits
Uninstall Gemini! Oh you can’t… Linux phones, this is bullshit!
i just dont use it to look up anything. and disabled thier playstore app, because apparent they also secretely download a spyware app on your phone too.
We might need a few reforms to our economic model where the stupidest sociopaths alive get lots of money and teachers and nurses do not.
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.
on my ironfox mobile browser, i could not use google, because i dont know how to get around thier recaptcha, it was asking everytime i opened the browser, so i just use duckduck go instead.
Are you me? It sounds like you’re me, but ahead of the journey.
Already on Graphene and Linux (openSUSE in my case) and considering starting to self-host myself.
I think in the short term this is the only solution to escape the garbage that the internet has become.
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 dont log into to youtube most of the time, just draws unnessary attention, from other users.
from other users.
Can you elaborate? Using a compartmentalized account just to watch videos seems it shouldn’t draw any attention unless you’re getting into fights in the comments.
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 like the convenience of being shown all my subscriptions, and with a trained algorithm actually being shown suggestions I’d be interested in. I think with an account used just for YouTube and nothing else the value to Google is minimal. It’s the last thing I have left from de-googling everywhere else.
Knew from inception Gemini was shit
They don’t even need Gemini for this… They are just shoving into everyones face. I am sure data they have on people was watching the video is all they need and doesn’t take “ai” to figure it out.
Gemini is actually legit the best LLM I’ve used locally for anything, consistently faster and more accurate than even models taking up about double the resources
Shame it’s stupid locked down even in my ollama installation and it’s near impossible to get it to do something daddy google doesn’t like. Ah well, works really well for checking my garbage config files lol
Long as you like it, let it run. Its only gotten in my way by forcing tabs into my browser and asking if I want to converse with it in my messages app
More enshittification!
I don’t find Nebula to be an adequate replacement for youtube, but if they ever figure out how to keep me from blocking ads, Ima gonna change my mind.
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.
