this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
854 points (98.9% liked)

Technology

60052 readers
2832 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 51 points 3 months ago (5 children)

Are they so dumb They don't realize that when we pause a video we are likely not watching or even near our fucking phone or screen at that time?

[–] [email protected] 46 points 3 months ago

They do, they're probably just hoping the advertisers don't and keep paying for more ad space.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

They don’t care. If the advertisers pay for that spot then they make money! This has been the story with TV ads for decades.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago (1 children)

They do, and they don't care. The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more. When/if they implement pause ads advertisers will have an even bigger case against against yt inflating ad watch time to make more money. Facebook has this issue as well.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

The algorithm is actually tailored to find out if/when you fall asleep while watching videos, and then recommends longer videos in autoplay when it believes you are, because they'll get to play you more ads and cash out more.

You might be misremembering / misinterpreting a little there. This behavior is not intentional, it's just a side effect of how the algorithm currently works. Showing you longer videos doesn't equate to showing you more ads. On the contrary, if you get loads of short videos you'll have way more opportunities to see pre-roll ads, but with longer videos, you're just to just the mid-roll spots in that video. So YouTube doesn't really have an incentive to make it work like that, it's just accidental.

Here's the spiffing Brit video on this, which I think you might have gotten this idea from: https://youtu.be/8iOjeb5DTZI

Edit: to be clear, I fully agree that YouTube will do anything to shove ads down our throats no matter how effective they actually are. I'm just saying that this example you've brought is not really that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago

Huh yea you've actually got a great point there. Also one of the YouTubers I watch is quite open about his knowledge on content creation and the algorithm and he once claimed yt knows when and to whom showing ads is beneficial, if you don't mind sitting thru ads your supposedly more prone to get them, which is the reason why every time I'm using the official YouTube client for whatever reason I make sure to close and reopen the video as many times as it takes until I get it to start playing with no ads 😂 If that is true they'd def use that as an opportunity to roll out more ads cus no ones there to skip em

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Advertising these days is less of a way for websites and services to make free money.

Of course websites and services that serve ads will deny this vehemently because advertisers who become aware of such practices (typically known as click fraud) will cut off those websites from ad revenue very quickly and stop serving ads there.

The idea is to trick the advertising companies into thinking that we are there and we are watching, and we care, so that they will pay money to the website to display ads there.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

It's the opposite. If you pause the video you the viewers are almost always looking at the screen. The pause button on a mobile phone or web browser is literally on the player. You are guaranteed to see it immediately after you push the button. You will see it when you un pause. These ads are display banners not video. It only takes a second to see the ad.

Unlike video ads that just auto play, especially when the video player auto plays more videos, there probably is more probability you aren't actually watching, unlike pause ads that require user activity and focus on the screen to push the pause button.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Google probably only spent months researching this and they only have all the tracking and user studies to know what you said. Please ignore the obvious fact that you are looking at the screen when you are pausing or resuming a video, KingJalopy knows better and Google is just dumb. Nobody will see any of these ads and they are adding them in vain.