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YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

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Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse: the incentive is to police the creators, not the advertisers. Youtube will bend over backwards for advertisers whose "brand safety" team doesn't want their product to appear next to a swear word, and demonetize/strike/etc those creators. But the ad content itself isn't policed nearly as relentlessly.

You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important, but unfortunately YouTube is a monopoly and is addictive, so content is more or less fungible from Google's perspective. If you aren't viewing ads on creator A's content, you'll probably be viewing them on creator B's content instead. It's not like other streaming services where there is real competition and losing particular content wou…

> You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important,

The economics of supply and demand disagree with you.

A lot more people want to be creators, than there is money in the ecosystem to support them.

If you want to hold platforms responsible for scams being advertised on them, you're going to need to rewrite a lot of law.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#262
post #256
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> YouTube is a monopoly and is addictive Youtube is indeed a monopoly -- but it's not actually addictive. Since they started this war against adblockers I have found that I can perfectly live without it. When I absolutely would like to watch an informative video (for example, about how to fix something on my bike, etc.), I first try to open the video in a private window (with ublock on); if that also doesn't work I t…

> but it's not actually addictive Youtube is definitely addictive to a large population of people. If you can live without it, the only thing we can infer is that it's not addictive to you .

[dead]

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, it's a high interest rate phenomenon. Investors want to see profitability. But it's also a problem unique to trillion dollar companies: finding growth. If you have a money printer of $280B per year, how do you find growth that moves the needle? For new product development, you'd need to launch a product that brings in revenue of say $20B, otherwise it's just not that interesting. Imagine how hard it is to launch…

> it's a high interest rate phenomenon Well, it's more of an interest rate change phenomenon. All companies are currently overvalued by absurd amounts, but the computer-related ones have it dialed a few dozen notches above "absurd". Things became this way because of the zero interest rate (and the expectation that it was permanent), but it's not sustainable anymore.

> All companies are currently overvalued by absurd amounts, but the computer-related ones have it dialed a few dozen notches above "absurd".

Google's P/E is 25.6

S&P 500 is at 24.59

DJIA is at 26.35

There are exactly 4 'computer' companies among the 30 companies that make up the DJIA.

If you're looking for overvalued, that would be Tesla at 70.3, or Amazon (Who reinvests aggressively) at 75.6.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#264

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You realize normalizing this with comments like that is what makes it not shocking? Self fulfilling prophecy

I wouldn't call sarcasm normalization of shitty practices, but ok.

Sarcasm is just a way of phrasing things. Sarcastic comments can make almost all the same arguments that non-sarcastic comments can.

If sarcasm makes fun of not expecting something, then it's normalizing that thing.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So basically I'm supposed to pay protection money? Yeah, I don't give into extortion...

You can see it as extortion or... Paying for a product instead of being the product. Huge quality of life improvement. How is it different from paying for Netflix and similar?

There are two issues.

On youtube the content was uploaded by creators on the understanding it would be freely accessible to everyone.

Additionally it's a matter of user control and rights. They don't get to tell the user what their user agent does and what content it should fetch or display to the user or what code it should run.

It's their website, but it's my device.

The next step is for youtube to require you to watch the ad and stop playing if you look away.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You'd think that creators making people want to use the site would be important YouTube's audience size and advertising metrics have long since gone through the point where individual creators or groups of them matter little. If a creator walks off the platform there are more who will fill the place, in search of potential monetisation, so youtube will still have somewhere to hang adverts off. An advertiser leaving…

It's quite obvious they either have advertiser problems or their ad serving algorithm sucks. I get so many repeats in stuff I'm not interested in at all, and completely unrelated to what I watch. I don't know if it's a matter of those ads bidding the highest or what. But YouTube's ability to show something I'm interested in is worse than even what the daytime TV ads were back in the day.

I wouldn't buy ads on any of the major platforms.

Twitter (when I downloaded my info, they were still called that) classified me as speaking three languages I know zero words of, and as having interests in several sports (I care for none); my YouTube ad experience is like yours; my Facebook experience today was about renouncing my US citizenship (I'm a British national); the Instagram ads are only marginally less bad — I do find myself liking them, but I have no idea what they're selling because what I get shown are all uplifting landscapes or cute animals with no sales pitch.

Edit: also, a friend of mine was just playing a game, advert popped up in a language neither of us could read. I had to open Google Translate just to find out it was Romanian and which button was "close" (and also to discover that it was an ad for "easy and fast international payments"?)

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#267
No surprise. In a sense, I bought my premium because I was fed up with scam. I wouldn't mind targeted ads if they are not too excessive. But watching a gambling scam tailor-made for my (adittably) small country broke the camels back for me. Apparently, there is no "with malice intent" clause anywhere, otherwise these ads would be illegal everywhere by default.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even worse: the incentive is to police the creators, not the advertisers. Youtube will bend over backwards for advertisers whose "brand safety" team doesn't want their product to appear next to a swear word, and demonetize/strike/etc those creators. But the ad content itself isn't policed nearly as relentlessly.

True, and it's so ironic when the situation reverses... Of the ads that recently slipped through my adblockers, one was a xenophobic piece of Hungarian propaganda against illegal immigrants. It was shown in the middle of a Minecraft video (a game without binary gender); that was made by a disabled person; to people living in a city where ~50% of the population was born elsewhere. Google does have all of that context,…

Google doesn't care about the context, they care about who pays the most for the ad. Hungarian fascists have deep pockets[0] and are willing to spend shittons of money to make you watch lies about immigrants[1]. Most of that money is wasted, but if they can radicalize even one out of a million viewers, they won. So they pay loads for it.

Yes, this is the same math that scammers run on - because fascism is a scam category, alongside advanced-fee fraud, refund scammers, and fake tech support companies. Your grandpa thinks the immigrants are invading the country for the same reason he thinks he needs to wire $10,000 to the 'bank' of a Nigerian 'prince'.

also

> It was shown in the middle of a Minecraft video (a game without binary gender)

For the same reasons as above, the creator of Minecraft went from "I don't want gender in my game" to "all women are evil", because he isolated himself in an LA mansion and read nothing but Twitter. He also had a girlfriend he broke up with. This makes you vulnerable to being fed bullshit that agrees with you - in the same way that expecting a UPS package might make you vulnerable to clicking a fake UPS text that steals your login info. Either that, or Notch was a trans inclusive radical misogynist[2] the whole time!

Now, let's say you're a scammer. Your 1-in-a-million odds suck - but what if you could pay more money to find more vulnerable people to send texts to? Like, even if you went from paying $1 CPM[3] for 1-in-a-million odds to $10 CPM for 1-in-ten-thousand, which is mathematically identical, you still get an advantage because less people can see what you're trying to steal. Targeted advertising lets you do this[4], and for unrelated reasons, legitimate advertisers will pay more to target their ads to a smaller but more lucrative cohort as well. So Google inherently makes more money the more they build out tools for scammers to do their scamming.

You are perfectly in the right to block ads. I pay for YouTube Premium but I won't yell at anyone who uses uBlock Origin.

[0] To be clear, we don't know exactly where the money comes from, though I can guess either Russia or Saudi Arabia

[1] The core irony of fascism is that the most efficient way to demonize the other is to point out that the other also has a fascist wing. e.g. in America, Christofascists yell and scream that we need a Muslim ban to keep Islamofascist terrorists out.

[2] See also: James Somerton

[3] Cost per French thousand

[4] If you read between the lines I'm accusing Google for the last decade of democratic backsliding.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#269

As it turns out there is a whole category in YouTubes ad system for Get-Rich-Quick schemes, as detailed out in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkhGJUTW3ag&t=1031s (timestamped at the relevant time). Just today I saw my elderly father click on a YouTube ad link for a crypto scam copying Swedish televisions web layout he was reading it and I saw it at the corner of my eye. He has adblock installed, he disabl…

> What is he supposed to do, create a google account and get premium instead? I just put my parents on my family plan, you should consider it, it's a very low price for the peace of mind, plus they love not having ads

Last I checked (at least here in the US) - the family plan requires all family members to be living in the same physical household and there is some sort of geolocation check that enforces that rule. I'm divorced and my son goes back and forth between my and his mother's house so I can't upgrade to the family plan and put him on it.

Re: YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads

#270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can skip past those pretty easily. I let them play for creators I actually like, who also tend to pick less scummy sponsored ads. Some of them even make the sponsored content really funny or personal to them. You'll find the same quality spectrum. At least I know that the creator is seeing more of the ad dollars.

Sure, but that still makes advertising paid YouTube as “ad-free” a lie and a scam.

that is a rather cynical and unconstructive perspective

1. sponsored ads are only in a minority of videos, so largely the platform is actually ad-free. I'm paying to not have YT ads, I did not expect my subscription to eliminate sponsored ads. Where is the lie?

2. paid YT is categorically a better experience and worth every penny, even with the occasional sponsored ad, which again, can be skipped

3. YMMV, it really depends on the content you chose to consume. I stay away from the most viewed creators, it's typically low quality

4. Direct payments for a product is a much healthier model than the ad supported model, imho.

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