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.
Brandon Eich and Peter Thiel are also very questionable folk. If you prefer to stick with a Chromium, may I recommend Vivaldi? It’s made by people involved in old Opera (before that became a chromium skin as well).
Did not know Thiel was an investor, actually. If we’re judging software based on the personality of people we’ve read random crap about in the press then that’d indeed be disqualifying.
However, I’d argue maybe that’s not a great way to pretend you have any agency in an aggressively oligopolistic environment.
We may need to stop making choices based on knee-jerk personality-driven branding crap and start focusing on systemic issues. Just… you know, as a species.
Unfortunately, as long as our species put abstract and overall pretty useless concepts such as wealth before survival and basic decency towards each other, I don’t think we ever tackle systematic issues.