I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times. I swear i have woken up in the middle of 20+ minute ads. I thought it was a news article about china when it was an ad. Who knows when the skip button appeared. The few times i have seen these, it has always been a literal fake news show about china.

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titzer 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I have fallen asleep watching youtube many times.

Interesting new opportunity for YouTube here. Detect your usage patterns and near bed time show you increasingly boring content until you fall asleep, then fill your head with subliminal messages in these long ads.

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rightbyte 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

I fall asleep to YT sometimes watching speed runs when I have a hard time sleeping. When I wake up it is mostly running live streams of religious chants going in a loop. Hindu, muslim, orthodox christian. Or some strange genre of a Japanese anime girl making sounds.

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rhdunn 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I suspect that they are already doing that (or something like it) as I've seen certain content appear at specific times/days.

	▲	cruffle_duffle 2 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		One of the smarter product decisions they made was to tweak the algorithm to show different types of content based on time (and device). If it’s past 9:30pm and it’s the bedroom tv it suggests vastly different stuff than 6:30am on the living room tv. And for good reason! I’m not watching some slow “adventures through the milky way at light speed” video when I’m waking up! It’s very smart about that stuff!
	▲	pests 2 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I'm a heavy YouTube watcher (My rewind said I watched 4500 different channels last year) and agree too. The content I get recommended is different day vs night. It's also device dependent (even when logged into same account) - my TV and phone definitely have a slightly different algo.

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stavros 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Why would they help you sleep and take a gamble on subliminal anything working when they can just do it when you're awake?

	▲	titzer 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		I'm just spitballing sci-fi here, but maybe subliminal ads work better and their metric asston of computational models have told them so.

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i_am_jl 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I've seen these advertisements too, also only when my phone had been playing unattended for some time.

I have a (unsupported, unsubstantiated) theory that YT detects phones of "sleepers" and pushes more profitable content with the understanding it won't be skipped.

I've got a few spare phones, maybe I'll run an experiment.

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ksaj 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

With YT, it might be an account-specific metric. Ie: flagged as a frequent sleeper. This would not surprise me, since they track just about every other metric possible against your account.

You can have multiple YT accounts on a single gmail acct, but I don't think that'll fool them. They know where you initially logged in from. So you will likely need multiple gmail accounts to do this kind of experiment.

	▲	i_am_jl 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Good shout. They don't have SIMs, they'll be connected to a VPN router, and I'll create new Gmail accounts for each device, from each device.

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kube-system 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I'm not sure why it would specifically be targeting "sleepers"... there are a lot of reasons why someone might not skip ads... people who are sleeping are probably the least valuable of them.

It could just as well be something super valuable -- like an unattended kiosk device playing youtube to a crowd of people.

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i_am_jl 2 days ago | parent [-]

Regarding the kiosk, I wholly expect that an unattended device with YT on auto play will ratchet up the length/frequency of ads as long as they're never skipped.

Someone who falls asleep watching YouTube will skip ads, unless they're asleep.

The idea is that if YT can infer that someone is asleep (location, no movement, no sound, low light, night) that they can show the longest, most skip-inducing ads that they've got since they know they won't be skipped.

The difference between the kiosk and the sleeper is that if the sleeper gets a 20 minute ad at 2pm while they're eating lunch, they'll skip it. YT is incentivized to show the most profitable ad that someone won't skip.

The value in identifying sleepers isnt showing a long ad, it's showing a long ad with the certainty that it won't be skipped.

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intrikate 2 days ago | parent [-]

Sure, but why would I, as an entity buying advertising space, pay the same amount when YouTube is just going to try to show them to people who are asleep, that can't see the ads, and thus would have no effect anyway?

	▲	i_am_jl 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Your question boils down to "If I was buying a product from a company, and they made it worse, why would I pay the same price for it?" Because YouTube has a functional monopoly on online video advertising in a huge number of markets. Enshitification is not just for YouTube's viewers and creators.

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Gabrys1 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think they specifically target people who tend to go to sleep. But, having worked in the ad engineering, I can imagine they do know how often specific users skip ads and target ads based on that property.

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gwbas1c 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Shortly before I started paying for YouTube, I remember seeing one of those ultra-long ads. The ad seemed interesting, so at first I didn't want to skip it. As soon as I saw that it was a looooong ad I got into the habit of checking the length of an ad before I even considered if it's worth watching.

Now I just pay for Youtube. I'm a lot happier that way.

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bastardoperator 2 days ago | parent [-]

Time is money. Ten minutes of daily YouTube ads adds up to 5 hours a month. Premium costs $14, roughly an hour's work at minimum wage. Trade one hour of labor for four hours of free time. That's 48 hours back each year for $168. It's a no brainer. Even if your wage is half of 14 dollars, you would still gain 24 hours back and it would still be worth it.

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blibble 2 days ago | parent [-]

or install ublock origin and keep your money and the time!

while depriving google of revenue AND costing them money

win, win, win and WIN

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Aerroon 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Also decreasing the likelihood of content that you like watching gets made? The creator is being paid from that ad revenue too.

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blibble 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

if my viewing actively cost the video creators money from me watching I'd probably feel guilty and stop

but this isn't the case, I'm completely cost neutral to them

but it does directly cost Google money... and I'm perfectly fine with that

	▲	Aerroon a day ago \| parent [-]
		I'm not making a moral judgement here. I'm talking about sending a signal that this type of content is valuable to make, leading to more content of that type being made.

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olyjohn 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Or maybe they will move to a platform that respects them. Gotta start somewhere.

	▲	Aerroon 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		They're on YouTube because it's the platform that gives them the greatest chance of success. What other popular video platforms do you know that give you 55% of the ad revenue?

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gwbas1c 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I watch YouTube on many devices through the app. At the time, I was using YouTube music.

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Forgeties79 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

They also do this with kid’s content on YT but they make it look like a show basically. Might not happen on YT Kids, I basically never use either, but the few times we pulled up YT proper I’ve seen it happen. Get a few videos deep and they slip them in

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pests 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I've seen bands release music in those long ads, a complete movie, a 2 hour podcast, and tons of the fake news stuff. I think for some its a unique way to advertise and get exposure, others is just YT farming adtime.