When ads are the primary source of revenue, there's zero incentive to police the platform
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
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
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
And with the promise of impressions (or whatever the equivalent of eyeballs is nowadays) there's little incentive to police the platform for bots.
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.