What is shocking about youtube's advertising is just how bad the supposedly "targeted" aspect of it is.

The entire original advantage these tech companies had over traditional entertainment and media companies was their access to data and their ability to use that for targeted advertising. It was supposed to be a win-win, so they claimed. The viewer would get targeted advertising to match their interests and brands would get their ads delivered in a hyper accurate way.

Instead, the ads are just garbage. If anything, most of the ads I see on my tv (the only time I see ads on youtube) are worse than the ads I see in traditional media, like magazines or TV, in the sense that they literally don't feel targeted or curated at all. I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related! Do you know where I do see far better targeted advertising? Bike magazines and print media!

The entire idea that youtube is good at what they do (to make money) just seems to be a sham in my experience.

The ads are garbage because Google didn’t want the ads to be hyper optimized and hyper targeted to you. It gives people an uncanny valley feeling. Meta takes a different approach and people often accuse Instagram to snoop on their conversations, even if Instagram is not doing that and is merely good at optimizing the ads. And given that both companies are successful at ads, I’d say both approaches are commercially successful.

"The ads are just garbage"

But the interesting thing is that, statistically what they are serving maximizes their revenue. So they have the best version of what they want to do, and it keeps maximizing their objectives (profit).

The problem is that such objective became somewhat perpendicular to what some people like. It's funny but maybe watching that stupid Ad, somehow makes you do something that in the end makes them profit.

I'd say fully 25% of the ads I see on YouTube are for the Baerskin "tactical" hoodie. I'm pretty sure it's just generic dropshipped Chinese junk but the advertising is relentless. And how the hell is it possible for a hoodie to be "tactical"?

> I watch tons of bike races and highlights on youtube TV and then almost all my ads are for cars, generic laundry detergent, and obvious scam crap products, anything but something bike related

If I had to guess, niche products for niche interests have small ad budgets, but the random detergent ad buyer is happy to bid on anyone's eyeballs. You can't target ad buys that don't exist!

On the other hand, before I bought YT premium I was regularly getting ads for Chevron gas in Spanish (which I don't speak), and would be unsurprised if YT ad enshittification drove premium sales.