> Well now the question is "How can you tell". And I don't think you generally can.

You can, actually, with a simple rule of thumb: if it's being advertised on YouTube, it's statistically low quality or a scam. The sheer number of brands that sponsor videos just to be exposed later for doing something shady is just too high.

▲

rowanG077 7 days ago | parent [-]

That's the point. You can't tell. Applying a low resolution filter like you are proposing will filter out a ton of worthwhile products. Here is just a small list of products you can no longer buy if you subscribe to your philosophy: apple, dell, HP, framework, tuxedo and basically almost all laptop manufacturers. The same goes for smartphones. No GPUs at all for you. The filter is so crude it fails spectacularly at what it should be doing.

	▲	alpaca128 7 days ago \| parent [-]
		Perhaps a more fitting variant would be that the trustworthiness decreases with increasing number of sponsored channels and ad frequency. Although I have never seen any video directly sponsored by Apple, Dell or HP for example, same for GPUs and many smartphone brands. They provide free units for review at most, and those at least go to channels with fitting content and the trustworthiness can be judged more easily. Whereas some new brand you never heard of aggressively sponsoring videos of every major channel for months basically guarantees there's something wrong with the company, product or both. I thought it goes without saying that I don't mean ads shown directly by YouTube, if you don't already block those in 2025 I don't know what to say.