YouTube doesn't want to take down scam ads
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When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform
TL;DR:
If you're a major on-line ad distributor like Google/Meta, and broadcast malicious ads to consumers, then you should be liable for them according to local laws just how TV and radio broadcasters are liable for the same thing.
Long argument:
Sure those ads don't break Youtube/Google's own internal policy (why would they, they're an ad company reporting to their shareholders), but what about breaking the nation's/Canada's policy on ads? I bet there might be some fines there to be handed out. Hear me out.
If such scams aren't legally allowed on licensed national TV and radio channels or printed media, otherwise the broadcasters and publishers would face crippling fines, then why do we as government agencies allow Youtube to get away with broadcasting these scams to its viewers?
Sure, Youtube is not a licensed TV broadcaster but maybe we should start regulating them partly as such, similarly how the EU's Digital Markets Act aims to fix current major digital gatekeepers and make them as compliant as physical markets.
I mean, one of the main reasons big-tech has reaped such insane profits is that the same regulations that apply to traditional physical businesses like brick and mortar markets and media broadcasters, did not apply to them because they operated on the unregulated Wild West that was the internet, while also extracting all the global profits that come from operating on such a global scale except with none of the costs assigned to local legal regulatory compliance that operating physical business have.
So now it's time to patch these digital loopholes and have big-tech operating in the ad space just as accountable as the rest of the businesses, considering their size, outreach and therefore influence on the gen-pop. Google's not a scrappy start-up anymore, they can definitely afford to police the ads they serve according to the local laws, considering their size, workforce, ML tech and profits. Same with Meta and their ad network.
I heard it before when playing GTA Vice City on the in game radio and thought it's just satire, but no, it's actually pretty accurate. "Ask your doctor..."
It's actually worse than that. If they were neutrally broadcasting, they'd at least have the argument that they were conceptually just a common carrier providing a neutral conduit between advertisers and consumers. But they are actively selecting which ads to present to which consumers---with respect to scam ads, they are preferentially sending scams to the people they believe are most likely to fall for them, and profiting as a result. They are not neutral conduits, but active participants in the underlying fraud.
Note that Section 230 only means they are not treated as a publisher or speaker of the fraudulent offer. That does not mean that they could not be held liable for an independent act in furtherance of the fraud, such as identifying vulnerable targets in collusion with the scammers and preferentially presenting the fraud to those targets.
It's kind of like the difference between a WW2-era dumb bomb and a modern GPS & laser-guided smart bomb. Way more deadly at the same payload.
It would be naive to think a company could behave otherwise in the long term.
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 a new product like that? If you'd have a billion users (which is absurdly hard for a new product), you'd then need to monetize them for $20 per year per user. In a saturated competitive environment where users don't want to pay.
Hence, the more common strategy is to turn some dials on the existing money printer. Just increase ads.
That's why FB's Metaverse bet wasn't crazy at all. You make $100B+, social media is stagnating, and you need a huge new revenue stream. They don't really exist. You have to go crazy on big bets.
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.
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.
But "growth" is a moving and indulgent target. For some, increasing profits isn't the growth that matters. Rather, increasing the rate at which profits are increasing is the true metric. So even vastly increased profits can still be a form of failure that requires more actions be taken to wring more money out of the platform and its users.
A company that reinvests these profits in things which investors believe will result in growth is valued x*future_profits, which is much larger - so if the leadership of a 'growth company' would announce that they're now a 'stable company' just paying out dividends, they would destroy most of the stock value of their investors, and would be considered an absolute failure of that leadership, since everyone involved has a strong incentive to replace them with someone who can make it (at least in the eyes of public) a 'growth company' again, doubling or tripling its value for the same revenue.
You are not grasping the scale of the matter.
Thus, Google has an incentive to keep the ad space free of scams - it makes Google users more valuable to advertisers.
So my guess is that even though scammers are still finding victims, the side effect is that more and more people are mentally equating ads with scams and the whole "industry" loses - both big brands ("is someone impersonating them, just like they usually do with famous people?") and small ones ("I've never heard of them, it's probably scam like the rest").
I'm exactly the same. I will try to go directly to websites instead of clicking on adds from search results to avoid the PPC charge too.
If the people making ads can be influenced by ads, why would they ever stop making them? It works for them, doesn't it?
But there's also the rumor floating around that all of these metrics are just hugely inflated, that these modern ads have in truth rates so miserable that a plain old billboard in the middle of nowhere would serve advertisers better, and that therefore the "modern WWW" is built on a foundation of lies, exagerations, and fake statistics.
Choose your poison.
Most ads are about a future purchase. They need to measure not did you buy now from this ad, but did all the ads you saw across all platforms (YouTube, Facebook, radio, tv, billboards) make enough of a difference in your buying habits when you finally buy. This is hard to measure, but it is more important. Most people are not buying now from an ad, they are buying in the future.
Sometimes ads are about an image. Even if you cannot afford some luxury good, they may want to advertise so that you recognize it on someone else and think "that is a rich person".
What is the policy, as long as you pay and don't do anything outright offensive, it's all fair game?
¹ At least I wouldn't if I was doing ad campaigns of a big company, but maybe I'm naive...
Note too that if YouTube would police scam ads better they would have a better message to various countries that laws and legal action is not needed at all. Right now I'm shocked the EU hasn't put in place harsh laws about ads - if YouTube would police their own ads they could have a slightly less harsh policy in place and thus make it not worth while for the EU to pass the harsh law they don't like.
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 is harder to replace than a content provider.
eBay has a similar flip some years ago: they realised that there was more value caring for buyers needs than sellers: sellers swarm in attracted by the number of buyers and are difficult to put off for long as there are often few other options, buyers need to feel safe to hand around.
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.
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"?)
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 try to use yt-dlp.
But I have completely stopped mindlessly watching videos that are not the result of a search.
There's nothing necessary about youtube.
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.
It's great that you're in the majority of people who aren't addicted to Youtube, but that doesn't mean everyone has the same experience that you do.
Not everyone, sure, but a majority. People can get addicted to anything; yet we don't just call any activity addictive -- only those where most people have a hard time controlling their behavior.
I don't think watching youtube qualifies (not just being on your phone, or watching tv).
But the real problem is that Youtube makes all this money but it still took a decade+ to start looking profitable. It's extremely hard to compete with them even if you somehow got over the network effects because it's hard to make money while also paying content creators. Google could do it because they could commoditize youtube's early unprofitability to their ads revenue.
Ideally, something like Netflix spawns and lets "amateur" content creators host as well, which solves many problems. But netflix doesn't seem interested and the few competitors doing that are still in the discovery phase.
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.
What I'm wondering is: Does YouTube not have enough quality advertisers? You'd think they'd turn away the scammers, because actual business doesn't want to be on the same platform as some shady "buy/sell gold" or similar. If they don't, is that because there's no money, or not enough honest business buying ads in a sufficient amount? Or is it that YouTube just makes more on the scams?
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, and yet this is what their ad selection algorithm picks.
This is one among many reasons why I have absolutely zero moral reservations about blocking YouTube ads. (inb4 ad money: I do support creators directly, as my budget allows.)
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.
Facism or not, those heavy ad campaigns come from the most extreme ends of the spectrum. And the new age will adapt to new tech faster. It's no suprise this is the result of it all, especially when platforms can claim article 243 to prevent any litigation against them.
>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.
ehh, who knows. 10 years is a long time and the first statement was made some 8 years prior to the 2nd. Could be bad experiences IRL or on the net, or both. Could be wounds much much older than Minecraft coming up.
>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.
Google has plenty of money and adtech as a concept is the antithesis to how I operate (let's COMPLETELY TANK the performance of your web browsing because people will pay us to be hostile t the user. And then tank it more so we have proof that the user actually got successfully harassed).
But from a purely logical perspective, I don't like the argument of "google has bad ads, therefore I block all ads". That just doesn't track well.
> especially when platforms can claim article 243 to prevent any litigation against them
CDA Section 230 (or just "CDA 230"), and this actually isn't the reason why platforms get away with this shit. All CDA 230 says is that moderating your platform doesn't mean you're liable for defamation that you miss. This is because of a prior court case that litigated the opposite. The Wolf of Wall Street[0] sued two online services for not taking down speech he wanted to censor. One of them was ruled as not liable because they didn't take down anything; the other was ruled as liable because they took down something.
So taking away CDA 230 would do is turn every forum more moderated than 4chan into a censorship hellscape as rich people perpetually demanded any speech they didn't like be taken down, or worse, sued companies into oblivion for hosting your own speech. You would not be able to sue Google because they served you a fake Elon Musk crypto grift ad any more than you already are able to.
What you really want is to copypaste EU GDPR into US law. This would make ad targeting illegal, which thus would make scam advertising ineffective, because scams rely on surveillance in order to scale.
[0] As in, the guy the movie was about
It’s wild that they couldn’t advertise a sponsor but YT allows scam ads to roll before their videos
Yep. I stopped bothering to report obvious scams on Facebook as any response I got was they didn't breach any standards (for others I got no response at all), yet I've had a comment removed because calling someone a numbskull was unduly rude/aggressive/whatever (I forget the exact complaint given).
For a while I added comments details why it was so obvious the scam posts were scams, but this has little effect as my comment would be quickly drowned out by the many “I got mine OK!” and “thanks!” comments that are presumably placed by compromised accounts. It also backfires: commenting, even to point out the scammyness, is interaction – that interaction tells the recommendation algorithms that I might want to see more of that sort of thing or worse that my friends/family would also.
In my experience, Twitter was more responsive to reports (even if still wanting) before Elon Musk bought it.
The Irish gov't wasn't spending enough ad dollars for Google to care.
I believe from the article that you linked that the case is still before the High Court and so he has not lost yet.
I wonder would the case have been better made as an instance of identity theft?
Also while you are accurate in saying that the Tánaiste is equivalent to the Vice President in U.S. terms, because they are the deputy head of government. The same being true with respect to Taoiseach. I would like to point out that they are not the same positions. While the U.S. President is commander in chief of the U.S. military, the Taoiseach is not the command in chief in Ireland – that falls to the Uachtarán (the President).
Tánaiste = Deputy Prime Minister
Taoiseach = Prime Minister
Uachtarán = President
And with the promise of impressions (or whatever the equivalent of eyeballs is nowadays) there's little incentive to police the platform for bots.
To be fair, I block ads, so I don't see many, but the few times I don't have them blocked, they are usually the kind you see on TV: big brand products, blockbuster video games, etc... with the very occasional scam and maybe a few of these fake games. But nothing like what you get on shady sites like porn, torrents, etc... and email spam.
And they don't seem to do it to comply with some laws, or making it more kid friendly since, as you said, sports betting gets a pass, even if it is absolutely "adult" and maybe even illegal in some countries. Obviously, scams are illegal too.
It just mean they think scams don't give them enough of a bad reputation to police against, which is weird do me, one would think that reputable brands wouldn't want to appear next to scammers.
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 disabled it because of the terms of service popup by YouTube. What is he supposed to do, create a google account and get premium instead? How about having safe ads so he doesn't have to figure out YouTube premium?
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
Paying for a product instead of being the product.
Huge quality of life improvement. How is it different from paying for Netflix and similar?
If it were ads for car insurance and lego, I don't think there would be the same concern.
You're still the product. You think they aren't still collecting info on what you watch and associating that with your google account for cross-marketing elsewhere on the web?
-Every corporation in the world.
I do really enjoy my ad free YouTube, 8 years and counting, the $20 / month for 5 accounts is very much worth it
I also run pi-hole at home, because while I understand the need for ads, I'm done with 23 ads, 15 flyouts, 1 video that will play in the corner until the end of time even though you obviously scrolled past it with zero intention of viewing it, 4 animated gifs, a pop-up chatbot window, etc. etc. etc.
You'll find the same quality spectrum. At least I know that the creator is seeing more of the ad dollars.
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.
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.
A lot of YouTube creators make their content for money. YouTube in this case is the layer between creator and watcher, making sure they get paid. Wether that is by ad money or subscription money. Before that, things were much more difficult for video creators.
> The next step is for youtube to require you to watch the ad and stop playing if you look away.
The next step for YouTube is hopefully to put the entire site behind a login and remove all ads.
But, this kind of stuff is a big reason they want remote attestation so badly.
Except the timeshare pitch is hyper-personalized specifically for you based on your entire internet history everywhere and is designed to yield the maximum chance of manipulating you into falling for it.
As a consumer you have easy options to block out the sales pitch, except the store who has a monopoly on the thing you want is now trying to scare users into disabling their ad blockers. The users that do this are disproportionately more likely to be less versed in how these things work and are thus more likely to fall for the scam.
Yes, it's a protection racket. It's just got a funny hat on this time.
Yes? I've mostly quit watching YouTube (and really a lot of media) because the shear amount of it and the number of predatory dark patterns have just gotten to be too much for me (it's possible that I'm overly sensitive in some way). But if it's important to him, then maybe it's worth paying some money for the experience. Personally I'm trying to get back into reading/audiobooks.
Yes YT should invest more in review and policy work — but it’s a forever expanding cost with no silver bullet.
I appreciate there’s a least a price and option for ads-free.
I really do try not to be the perpetual downer here, but Google has nearly unlimited resources including psych PhDs on staff to influence peoples' behavior and I assume executives with black holes where their souls would normally be who are trying to satisfy that void with money, but can never do so.
I guess the best I can say is that it's about picking your battles.
Famously, this is a place where FAANG employees have some representation, so I suspect that the comments do occasionally get read by people with at least some connection to the products. Increasingly, I wonder how they live with themselves; the older I get, the less any amount of money could get me to use psychological tricks on people in order to scam them.
almost
Putting the onus on the corporations is the one thing that's guaranteed, with a long and storied proven track record, of not working.
Go watch something else, somewhere else, another site, or you know tv or something.
Community Notes (formerly Birdwatch) lets users flag tweets that are misleading. Since Ads on Twitter are just normal tweets, they can be fact checked.
Twitter's average ad quality has plummeted recently, but most of the scam ads I see have a massive user-added disclaimer outlining how it's a scam. I wonder how this affects the click through rate for these ad placements?
I've seen many of these community notes - how exactly do these work ?
Is a community note borne out of "most upvoted" replies to a particular tweet ? If so, how does it go from a simple upvoted reply, to a "community note" ?
> To find notes that are helpful to the broadest possible set of people, Community Notes takes into account not only how many contributors rated a note as helpful or unhelpful, but also whether people who rated it seem to come from different perspectives.
https://communitynotes.twitter.com/guide/en/about/introducti...
It's one of few things at Twitter that work shockingly well and reliable. I've never seen an obvious partisan community note. Other networks should embrace this.
Elon doesn't think so. I would expect it to change soon.
Dramatic changes will likely happen.
In short, from what I understand, each community notes contributor is vector mapped based on their biases/contributions. Now, the only way for a community note to appear is for contributors who typically disagree with each other (based on their vector mapping) to both sign off on that note. I'd imagine in the future (or maybe it's enabled now), these contributors would be "power ranked" so a newbie contributor couldn't community note a member of congress or something.
As Elon said, this will lead to hoardes of people leaving twitter because they cannot handle community notes.
It's somewhat adversarial, with the idea that if people who have disagreed in the past agree on a note, then it's probably true.
If you say something obviously untrue there are already laws against fraud and false advertisement. For anything with less burden of proof, a note below your ad that adds context seems adequate
So it doesn't work. If it worked, you'd see no, or very little, scam ads.
It's crazy because YouTube has probably more information about the sort of products that I actually want to buy than probably any other company besides Shopify. About a quarter of what I watch are literally just product reviews. They have a ton of high-intent purchasing signal for reputable products, and instead they are showing me ads for trash. I know it doesn't have to be this way, because Instagram somehow manages to show me highly relevant ads for stuff that I've actually gone on to purchase after discovering there.
This shouldn't be surprising. Ad placement is based on who pays to be placed in front of certain audiences. It doesn't matter if you're really into hi-fi amplifiers if no hi-fi company placed ads for that audience segment or if the hi-fi companies were outspent by boner pill salesmen.
Google is not optimizing for relevance but for revenue.
Especially when they are mostly scams and trash paying to be in front of my eyeballs. I have no desire or obligation to be propagandized, tricked, or misled by bad ads just so I can watch a video I actually am interested in.
There's no contradiction here. Google's policies exist primarily in service of keeping their platforms safe for advertisers. The ads aren't placed on other ads though, so there's no reason for them to stress much about maintaining the same quality in their ads as the content being monetized.
As for targeting, they're just optimizing for CPM. If advertisers for scammy junk pay more than advertisers for things you might like to buy, then you get what you see now. There's always another mark for the scams.
Google has come quite a long way from "don't be evil".
'Digital' isn't new anymore, but somehow it avoids growing up.
I don't mind the antagonistic method today since I will NEVER accept the idea that an ad is acceptable. The law you propose would help weaken advertising and that would make me happy. Apple killing targeted ads also made it worst.
Sports gambling also makes the environment worst.
Coincidentally, the effort was paid for by the very same companies that ended up on the whitelist. From the outside, at least, this gave the impression that the whitelisting was simply paid for and covered up by a fig leaf process.
I haven't checked in a while, but that program always struck me as deeply problematic.
Today, that no longer matters, as ublock origin has emerged as a time-tested, no-compromise, user-choice content blocking solution.
The acceptable ads was a pay to win thing and very quickly devolved into exactly the kind of cesspool you'd expect
Then it would be up to your country to call their bluff. Who know whether they would or not. Google held out for longer than I thought they would on the Canada link laws. Ultimately, Google would give in and reopen YouTube, but how long would it take and would people give up YouTube for several months while wait for governments to battle Google facilitating fraud?
Obviously nothing is forcing Google to deal with this in any way. But I wonder how could that work out for Google in the long run.
Victims of these scams should sue Google, Meta and any other big company knowingly participating in these kind of scams.
Really? I mean, they're getting paid by a scammer who uses provably fake and deceptive content to prey on its victims; they have been alerted to the situation, they claim they reviewed it, and that they think it's fine. What could go wrong?
That said, there seems to be no legal way for a big Czech company to go neither against Google or the scammers, otherwise this would have been already resolved. CEZ (one of the companies being impersonated by the scammers here) made a press release about this almost 2 years ago (references are in Czech):
https://www.cez.cz/cs/pro-media/tiskove-zpravy/klamave-rekla... https://www.cez.cz/cs/podvodna-reklama
The digital platform policies are relatively meaningless, subjective enforcement, appeasement measure for advertisers. You will not see the needle move on video as fraud until the commission model for talent fees and use rights change for digital. A talent fee commission model results in industry tracking of creative content in order to route talent fees to actors and musicians. It is a secondary layer of tracking with funds attached that forces a platform to respond when illegal use of image and identity is reported.
We had to hire someone to review ads in Google's ad transparency center. Every day they find dozens of new domains, with the same creatives - all those fake button "Continue"/"Download" click-trick ads.
The same process every ad. Report to google, block on google, and send to a third party ad security company. The volume didn't start going down until we hired that third party ad security company to do blocking post-auction. Google continues to let the exact same creatives come through, just with different domains/ad accounts. Their models can handle this, they just choose not too.
Seeing the CPMs these scam ads pay, it must make up a big portion of a reportable revenue source for google, where blocking would hurt their numbers for the quarter.
If anything it would be an easy way for him to publicly show that scammy ads are a global problem and not just an X issue. Although I think it can be solved in a nanosecond if there was enough will.
Money, money, money.
Amazon (however unlikely) could viably come out with an ad-free YouTube competitor, backed by Prime subscription dollars. As long as the costs are in order they could let it stew for a decade while it slowly pulls users away from other platforms. Heck Netflix could do the same thing, although they seem to be drawn towards ads, sadly. X.com would probably love to do something similar, but they don't have enough services to match the value of Prime.
I’m not sure I understand. Amazon Video requires a paid subscription, by that logic YouTube also has ad-free content (if you pay for Premium). Not to mention, Prime Video is introducing ads next year unless you pay an extra ad-free fee.[1]
1: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/entertainment/prime-video-u...
Google just doesn't care.
If a reporting system is this difficult, one has to make the assumption that it's on purpose.
Even services that you pay for every month like Drive, they can lose all your data and you won’t be able to talk to a human about it. Photos will build anti-competitive walls around your content with no warning. Maps will track your every move and drown you in ads. Search and Youtube will profile you and steer you toward shallow promoted content. You are the product.
YouTube is just full of very obviously fraudulent tech and medical/health ads, especially if you’ve switched off ad personalization. Was it this bad on cable TV in the past? Isn’t the FTC meant to be actively policing things like this?
No, generally the FTC is not designed, equipped, or funded for actively policing advertisements. Its consumer protection action is almost entirely complaint-based/reactive, not active.
If you want active policing of advertisement by the FTC, you need to lobby Congress to vastly expand the FTC’s role and funding.
Also I think this should be a two way street. If content creators need to moderate their content lest they be slapped to death by Youtube to help the advertisers, advertisers also have a responsibility to ensure their advertisements do not cause issue for content creators and/or viewers.
It's unclear who currently runs Youtube, but they have been making bad decision after bad decision. Youtube is now extremely hostile which goes against the values it once held when it first grew.
Big advertiser beeing a top company like Coca Cola.
I have seen a few ads for those things on YouTube, but it isn't as constant as other forms of media.
* Risk of regulators taking an interest, because it shows the ad industry can't self-regulate.
* Risk of regulators taking an interest, because their voters are getting scammed.
* Risk of regulators taking an interest, because celebrities complain.
* Risk of regulators taking an interest, because deepfakes.
Garbage ads damage a brand. Google doesn't do anything because they think Youtube's goodwill will last forever. It won't. They've already ratcheted up the ads to a level where regular users are complaining.
Shocking.. truly shocking.
If sarcasm makes fun of not expecting something, then it's normalizing that thing.
Hume argued the fine lines between logical vs analytical derivatives and while he had a firm stance, others didn't and still don't agree wholly.
Let's take his claim that reason does not stir emotions enough to cause moral actions. That's great and arguable, but why then would he immediately move to, reason can only excite our emotions if it informs us about the world. That's a blatant and obvious contradiction.
His thinking leads to scenarios like his example of willful murder. According to him, the sole reason it's bad is our personal disapproval of it.
Facts don’t give rise to values, the two are independent.
But when that one man represent a hundred-billion dollar company, attorneys general seem to get very confused as to where their loyalty lies. It's unfortunate for the fifty families (and quite lucrative for the AGs and GGLs).
An automatic answer saying “this doesn’t go against policy” does not mean that it escalated to YT staff who carefully considered the ad and said “actually, this is okay because we really want the revenue.” It means that whatever ML classifier took a look at it thought it was okay (which is probably bugged, given their typical speed at taking down fake livestreams in this vein).
So what? Youtube is trying to do the online equivalent of trying to police New York City with only 50 cops and a 911 answering machine that repeats "computer says no" on a loop.
If New York City chooses to understaff their 911 call center, that's not an excuse for them not taking 911 calls.
https://decrypt.co/32102/scam-sony-playstation-5-reveal-even...
The problem isn't so much that these scams exist, but that youtube was actively recommending them to users, adding insult to injury, youtube was quicly taking down feeds from gamers commenting on the official reveal...
So much whining from YouTube addicts. Never seen any ad like this. And I block ads manually all the time for other more 'regular' things. Maybe if you weren't always watching videos about Elon and Crypto you wouldn't see these thrown in the mix. You're the target!
Maybe not with current regulation, maybe not in the US. But in other places: why not?
I report a scam, ads continues being shown is now a risk assessment to be taken by the platform. Though, now that I think of it, the first thing these platforms will do is to make reporting even harder.
There needs to be accountability for platforms at some point. It's ludicrous that a company with the resources of Youtube can just ignore that much literal fraud.
I will vote with my wallet and never give Google a cent, I feel gross enough already even just using any service owned by them. They are typical giant corporation who corrupt everything they touch. I reckon for every hour of valuable software work that makes its way to the public, 50 hours of bullshit managerial "work" is done by a sucession of gobshites with increasingly inflated salaries.
What actual value do they add? All the features and innovations they have made since acquiring youtube have been uniformly terrible, the best example is their pathetic attempt to ape tiktok with youtube shorts, so now they have two totally different systems awkwardly smooshed together on the same platform. They also, in classic Google fashion just randomly change the UI or randomly remove extremely useful publishing features for no reason on a weekly basis. They've pushed more and more ads. They've moderated and used the suggested videos features to encourage content farm garbage and punish actually good original content.
The real value of youtube is the amazing content creators who make world beating content for free. The actually good ones are mostly demonetized by youtube and either make zero money or only make money from Patreon supporters. So the actual value of youtube is the content creators, and also the audience who go there to watch. Youtube has been around for a long time and is basically the place to upload longer videos. Google gained control of this value by buying youtube and since then they have sat on this communally created value and simply engaged in rent seeking behaviour.
“Gee, it’d sure be a shame if your competitors showed up at the top of a search for your exact company or product. But if you pay us for ads on those keywords…”
At least on linear TV, there was some quality assurance in the ad buyer departments. Youtube, Google, Meta, the countless "chumbox" players (Taboola, Outbrain and others [1]) - they all thrive on letting everyone do whatever the f..k they want, with barely any human in loop.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumbox
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/08/dining/athletic-greens.ht...
Google's in some serious trouble. They've hit maximum revenue stream, but the Jerrys[1] of the company rely on perpetual growth for their careers to exist, so they will push, consciously or unconsciously, to find more revenue anywhere, even by selling out the product's future.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230919185431/https://www.justi...
It links to fake news site (copy of the biggest news site in the country), with fake news detailing our president just passed and to rush to get your free money. It's absolutely insane. I reported it multiple times and always just get "it doesnt break any policices". What? :D
It's pure cancer. I only saw this because of the recent YouTube adblock drama after disabling my uBlock after years. YouTube wants me hard to get back to watch ads, these ads, yea thanks no. At least some ads on Instagram are relevant.
The voice was in local language, while subtitles were in English. They did not match, possibly to evade detection by the more advanced, English, tooling.
I especially like the ones that layer in a totally fake creation story, like this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRl2aGUlu04.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WorrpfjAYdc
Yours is much more interesting though.
Here's Big Clive doing a teardown on the device in your video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sPnLnk35XsY
> Yours is much more interesting though.
Yeah, it's absurd in so many different ways. My favorite bit is the idea that "big heating" can get a kid expelled from school. It really is a piece of found art.
And that's just the straight up illegal ones, if we also count the questionable ones, the share is higher.
Years later, it turned out I was right.
If you called those folks they'd patch you through to a dishonest doctor who would write you a prescription for something like a back brace, even if you didn't need it. If you did need some kind of medical equipment later you might find you couldn't get it paid for because you already got the benefit.
I wonder if ubiquitous exposure to that kind of crap has political implications.
That is, you see a scam on TV several times a day that is clearly a scam but the people who run the TV station don't see it is a scam, bureaucrats don't see it is a scam, politicians don't see a scam. Politicians seem out so out of it that they launch their campaign with something that sounds just like a spam phone call.
OTA stations in most dayparts in Syracuse almost exclusively run ads for things you don't pay for with your own money: personal injury lawyers, prescription drugs, and things you can get with government benefits. You do see an ad for a car dealer from time to time because if nobody bought cars you couldn't get hit by a car to call William Matar.
I wonder if watching that crap turns people into Republicans.
I suppose it would be nice if there were an easy way for everyone to do this.
there were a few scam SpaceX live streams on YouTube where they would play footage of Elon on stage at night from when starship was first unveiled.
The scammers would overlay an AI deep fake of Elon’s voice and push a crypto currency scam!
Those channels were called SpaceXUS or SpaceXLive etc. with legit looking SpaceX logo.
Somehow they managed to gain 1k live followers to boost it in the YouTube algo.
If you want to see Google enforce something, try running a tobacco ad anywhere on their platforms.
These ads are a tax on the old and low IQ.
Cool side note: If you report on twitch.tv you get an email; If they do something about it, you get another email saying they actioned it.
> We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies, which prohibit certain content and practices that we believe to be harmful to users and the overall online ecosystem.
"Disclaimer. This ad and it's entirety is independent and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Donald Trump or any political party associated with him. The content and views expressed on this ad are solely those of the website owner and contributors, and they do not represent the opinions or official positions of Donald Trump or his party. Any references to individuals, organizations, or political figures are used for informational purposes only and do not imply endorsement or association. This ad also has no affiliation with Donald Trump and his party in any way. Additionally, this ad is not endorsed by Donald Trump and his party in any capacity. Lastly, the audio used in this ad was computer generated. Thank you and enjoy!"
The link goes to "Free Trump Gold -> wewillbegreatagain dot co". I didn't bother clicking the link, but I searched and found that this scam ad has been in existence for over a year.
I'm no lawyer, but I would be really surprised if this obvious attempt to ride on someone's name/(in)fame was legal. Surely Trump could sue this person for what they are doing. Surely normal people have flagged this ad to YouTube, but it's still up.
When searching for details about this particular ad, I read about general frustation people have with the vast number of scam ads on Truth Social. But that's a whole other topic...
FWIW, YouTube ads are just normal, unlisted videos. You can get their ID by:
- right-clicking on the video while the ad is playing,
- selecting 'Stats for nerds',
- copying the 'Video ID' from the debug info in the top left corner,
- appending this ID to 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v='
This also allows you to see the account associated with the ad and how often this ad has been played already.
For example, here's a (German) scam ad promoting a cheap ceramic heater as having "effectively no energy costs": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WorrpfjAYdc
Also, I've seen the scam heater ad as well. It's obviously bogus, but unfortunately a lot of people will fall for it. I guess if the ad weren't driving sales, they wouldn't still be running versions of it.
The scammers even shipped me a super basic bike light to show proof that they actually shipped an item. I had to first file a claim with PayPal and they refunded me but only after some haggling.
I reported the ad to Instagram with all the proof and pictures. I used their security/phishing contact to report this. The ad and the associated account was still there when I checked months later.
I mean I can understand these companies not wanting to care about us measly users enough to respond to account related queries. But this is their bread and butter. If I don’t trust your ads anymore why on earth would I ever click or buy anything. If anything it makes all good businesses lose as well. That’s their real customers. I see people here defending YouTube that it’s understandable that YouTube doesn’t have the time to screen ads. I call bullshit. This is their core product. Ads. They have to care for their own and their customers’ (advertisers) sake.
Typical deepfakes of celebrities, where they've stolen some clip, and get the person to promote some crypto scam. It's laughable. Imagine being 80, and seeing Warren Buffet or Bill Gates on youtube promoting some random crypto brokerage, saying that you can create generational wealth TODAY!
Since it's on youtube, it must be legit, right?
EDIT: I believe one way to solve this, is by heavy handed regulation where you make the websites (YouTube, etc.) financially liable for scams they are facilitating through ads etc.
Right now there seems to be zero incentives to removing this kind of stuff.
Which is probably a good example of Hanlon's law, because it's really in the interests of Facebook for their vetters dealing with reported ads to know who the guy that has the resources and inclination to sue them again when his likeness appears in ads on their platform, no matter how cynical their general policy on ad acceptance is.
Or when the Israel/Hamas war broke out, the number of propaganda ads from Israel/the IDF was outright disturbing. Most of them spewing the nonsense of Israel being "the holy ones" and they are fighting the "evil animals". Just repugnant rhetoric.
But, looked at separately, allowing users to put notes under paid-for (!) ads pointing out issues with them is pretty remarkable. Tech gets a lot of flak for bowing to advertisers in the name of $$$, but here it is the users who have some power to set misleading ads straight, with zero influence by the advertiser in question. That is laudable, even if in an ideal world this would be unnecessary, or at least less load-bearing in terms of preventing fraud!
I get gross out weird ads for what seem to be cleaning supplies but hell if I want to click on some weird gross mutant thing to figure it out.
All sorts of forms of "Protect yourself from 5g / wi-fi / various weird things, brain interference / that induce confusion." products ...
There's good content on Youtube, but man I can't help but think of it as much as a misinformation / scam platform with what they allow for ads.
"We’re writing to let you know that we reviewed your report (ID 1-3XXXXXXXXXX).
Here's what we found
We decided not to take this ad down. We found that the ad doesn’t go against Google’s policies, which prohibit certain content and practices that we believe to be harmful to users and the overall online ecosystem."
I recall seeing this and noting how, while I'm fairly certain it's a deep fake, I wouldn't be that shocked if it wasn't. As far as reputations go, Elon Musk really does seem like he'll say just about anything these days, and what he won't say he'll re-tweet.
It's important to recall that Youtube grew not because of "you" -- there was really not any kind of creator ecosystem for the first phase of massive growth. Youtube grew because of piracy and the posting/distribution of copyrighted content.
Unlike Napster which was blatantly P2P and obviously tried to circumvent copyright protections, Youtube had an official way for content owners to take steps to remove unauthorized content. In the days or weeks that it took to get content removed, it was copied and re-posted, and all the while Youtube continued to earn ad revenue from it until finally, many dollars later, it would be removed and successfully blocked.
In Today's world, Youtube makes money by incentivizing generatively created garbage content, much of which is shown to kids, and by spamming promoted content into playlists and generally always preferring to play content that was promoted over non-promoted content.
It's not clear how much of Youtube's revenue comes from quality content that people consume intentionally vs content that nobody would ever pay for that has managed to hijack the recommendation algorithm in some way.
Before that, you needed a video player installed on your computer that then either loaded in-browser or played videos after download. You often needed multiple players installed as none supported every video format.
Don't attribute user interest (which is what made YouTube grow) to the technical aspects of the site. That is almost never the case.
If you wanted to share videos online, good luck? You needed somewhere you could upload them and a lot of forums had file size limits, so sometimes you just spread/discovered them via p2p services. For the non-technical person, there were a few places you could submit videos to or browse 'funny internet videos', but most video sites were an individual or community's curated collection
Youtube bundled all of that up as "a video repository and search engine that provides a streaming player which is already supported by your browser", and (in the US anyway) that moment coincided with: (a) wide-spread broadband access and (b) digital cameras becoming accessible to consumers
So in that context, I think it might be a bit like saying "interest in reading increased after book printing technology made libraries comparatively inexpensive"
The youtube recommendation algorithm brings up new and cool content over long period of time, and I cultivated my recommendation feed as such.
It's a destination in itself.
Sure, you could have a video site that just have a top ten video and a subscription list, but it wouldn't be as compelling.
Now. There are a lot of things that youtube could rightfully be criticized for, and perhaps there should be major changes made to how youtube works. Better pay for youtube creators and payment to small channels for example. More promotion of youtube premium, and less advertising.
I assume that youtube is profitable. The question is how much service that they can offer but still remain sustainable. If they're not profitable, how they could monetize it without destroying the value of the platform, ideally adding to the value rather than taking it away. I like some of the youtube scripted show, and I was disappointed that they canceled a show that I want to see continued.
For you.
For kids it brings up amputation videos and seriously weird/predatory shit. Should they be cultivating their recommendation feed better?
Try searching for '!' on the homepage. You'll get a mix of kid videos and fucked up animated softcore furry shit. It's been like that for fucking years.
For me it brings up Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson shite constantly, despite my refusal to engage in such content whatsoever. It just figures, hey you like watching video game content so you'll love these smarmy shitheads.
It's vastly inferior to TikTok's algorithm by all accounts, like it's not even close. And it's been horrendously gamed.
All they have is the network effect and Google's monopoly powers. Their algorithm sucks, their ads suck, their policies towards creators suck (as you said yourself). Everything they've ever brought in that was actually good was cribbed from porn sites.
I've had success with just blocking these channels, or selecting "don't recommend this to me", after a while it stops suggesting right wing content to me, it hasn't for quite a while in fact.
Eventually, it does.
Or, I make one mistake, rando-click on something favorable and boom! They are back.
Also, at this point the suggestion algorithm seems close to worthless. My Youtube suggestion feed is either channels that I already follow, or whose videos I've watched recently, or complete garbage. Any worthwhile new channels or videos, I've have to seek out for myself.
That's part of it, but I'm certain there's more to it.
I've seen too many people and pages get their reach cut 100 fold over the last 7 or so years. The content was very engaging, had lots of likes and comments, then boom, they all started going from 5 or 6 figure posts down to 2 and 3 figures. Marianne Williamson, for example, hit 10% support nationally - then her Facebook posts went from 6 figures to 3 in a day.
Take Gaza, and the global calls for a ceasefire. Despite huge engagement, and the strong support of the vast majority of every countries population (bar Israel itself), I've seen virtually nothing about it on Facebook. On LinkedIn I've seen 1 single post concerning it since October 7th, and it had 0 likes. That's not natural. No fucking way.
You can watch "adjacent" content—at least according to YouTube—and you'll be fed Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson.
Even if you wanted to see that content, maybe that's as far as you're willing to go, personally. Too bad! You get even more extreme commentators.
The funny thing is, the second you take a step out of the anglosphere it still hosts an absolute tonne of copyrighted content that no one cares about. Just search for "full film" in Polish and you get lots of full films uploaded as-is and no one is taking them down
https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=pe%C5%82ny+film
Most of these were (1) a full film, but not the film the title claimed, (2) looked like they were non-HD broadcast TV quality, (3) were not in English, and (4) had a URL overlaying the video which I would guess was to a site where the movie given in the title could be found.