YouTube putting scammy ad about "double your Bitcoin" on Bitcoin University vid | Hacker News Reader

YouTube putting scammy ad about "double your Bitcoin" on Bitcoin University vid

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14 pointsstolsvik9 comments

They're putting these crappy ads e-v-e-r-y-w-h-e-r-e.

The quality of ads on YouTube has fallen to somewhere beneath the sewer, just as YouTube has launched a scorched-earth campaign against adblockers. Scams, celebrity impersonation, AI-generated nonsense, AI-generated nonsense promoting AI nonsense generators. YouTube's ad inventory is a vast wasteland of festering, unmoderated dreck.

This is obviously not an isolated incident. Bitcoin University has put a comment on their video about the problem, and Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy (who is being impersonated) has published several xeets about the multiple scams, both highlighting the issue.

https://youtu.be/kwPCJROXKiQ

https://x.com/saylor/status/1746298365036343477

https://x.com/saylor/status/1743390572973281294

Working in a relatively small company in this space but offering services like smart contracts audits, we had a lot of issue to creates ad on multiple platforms such as AdWords, Reddit, etc. While our services were 100% legit and waiting for their approval I was bombarded with all kind of scammy ads that made me wonder if it is just that I don't know the right people at the company to move forward or my budget was so small...

BTW, we are organizing a developers Hackathon and the ad in X is pending for more than one day.

In Web3, you're better off doing anything else but ads for the type of services you're offering anyhow.

Ads have always been a struggle in this space when working with platforms.

Malicious actors use a lot of compromised or aged accounts, that's why they're difficult to counter.

Yeah, but if they wanted, they could have AI’ed this to death.

https://x.com/stolsvik/status/1746351452618981887

I once binge watched certain type of music videos on YT and got ads that targeted people of color (I say this because the people used in the ads were consistently people of color) by scammy loan and get rich ads. It was long time ago. Shortly after that I installed an ad-blocker.

Been seeing a lot of adult ToS-breaking ads on YT lately. Some actually quite surprising, literally straight-up porn at times. Same with Facebook Marketplace having random explicit ads sprinkled into it (not listings, actual ads!).

A nitter.cz link for the thread. @TeamYouTube actually answered.

https://nitter.cz/stolsvik/status/1746337762842747388

Between ublock on my desktop and brave on my phone, I haven’t seen a YouTube ad in who knows how long - but I get the sense the ‘quality’ has plummeted lately.

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