Anyone else notice that most youtube ads are really bad. Seeing a product in a youtube ad now causes me to be more likely to believe it's a ripoff.

Things like a cheap $5 fan being sold for $60 as roughly: "Super efficient A/C that will save you $100s on your electricity bill and can cool a room down in just minutes"

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schmuckonwheels 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I assume you mean all the snake oil pre-playback ads? Mostly dangerous medical advice, solar scams, or wellness quackery.

This week, an instructional video I was watching on how to repair my water heater was suddenly interrupted by a campy ad for pussy-hair razors.

It was so ill-timed, bizarre, and inappropriate I burst out laughing.

The other one I was seeing a lot of, until very recently, was pornographic static ads that were implemented as an optical illusion. If you viewed it at full scale it was an innocuous image of a closet or chair or something, so it passed all checks, but when scaled into a thumbnail, it turns into a silhouette of a woman giving oral or something else obscene. Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done. (It's not a schooner, it's a sailboat.)

	▲	pixl97 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>Not sure what this technique is called or how it's done Downscaling/downsampling attack. Commonly used against AI systems either to pass filters or poison data. https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02456 If you know the sampling rate of the sampling filter you want to pass you can do some tricky encoding to show a different image at that particular resolution bypassing AI/content recognition systems. This said if it starts happening a lot Google will take those images/videos and feed them into a learning system that looks for those patterns and preemptively marks the video.

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sunaookami 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That's just... every ad. I mostly avoid products that I see in ads (like TV, radio and internet ads) ironically.

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R_D_Olivaw 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

When ai slop makes it cheap to churn out the ads this is what you get. What does YT care, they get the money either way.

Enshittification continues

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riffraff 4 hours ago | parent [-]

what I don't understand is how paying for YT ads can be profitable. I've never clicked on a YT ad _intentionally_ nor I know anyone who did, having asked a few people. I admit the brand awareness works tho.

	▲	gosub100 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There's a counterintuitive effect sometimes, which is that the person who tolerates a stupid ad is also more likely to buy the product. This was used by email spammers whose messages came littered with deliberate grammatical errors as an efficient filter against too-smart targets.