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.
Creators, afaik, make money mostly from merchandises, patreons, memberships, superchats,… not ads.
Ads are how Google makes money, which is fine in principle, except that Youtube is supposedly a “hosting platform” with all privileges associated, eg not being subjected to broadcast regulations, but acts like a broadcaster by promoting some content over another according to what’ll make them more money. If the internet worked like Youtube, you’d type wikipedia’s url in your browser, and instead it’ll redirect to some ad-ridden clone.
It depends on what they’re creating. There are definitely people that make good money from ads. The biggest problem is usually it’s an unstable income and you never know when the god of algorithm will just decide to nuke your channel for no reason.