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.)
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.
I do a cryptic crossword from a free UK newspaper most days, because my Dad (many thousands of miles away), also does the same crossword and we can bond over good and bad clues, and so on.
The banner ad on that page is always Temu. It always, always looks pornographic. And then you look closer, and it's completely innocuous.
I have assumed that the alogrithm is just optimising for attention, and it just so happens those images, at that scale, are going to get a lot of attention. But it does mean I can't show somebody else the crossword I'm doing for fear of looking like a degenerate pervert, and I am at risk of causing an issue if I play it on public transport.
Enshittification continues
If that rate is still true, then it would be 1,000 sales per 1 million ad views. Someone earlier mentioned a crappy $60 fan they saw advertised on YT. If the company generates $60,000 for a $10,000-30,000 ad buy (assuming $0.01-0.03 per view cost), then that is worth the effort. Even a 0.05% conversion would be worth it if you kept your ad costs to $0.01
Profitable while still making your anecdote true. Only 500-1,000 clicks per 1 million views is almost "no one clicks."
Claiming that (youtube) ads are bad is a tautology at this point. What else can be expected from something competing for what is left of a user's attention at the very lowest end of a market already overflooded with crud?
The question should rather be: why would one voluntarily let one's well-being be polluted by such invasive, parasitic crap.
There is nothing normal about ads everywhere. There is nothing healthy about ads everywhere. Ads are not an inevitability.
Run an ad-blocker, protect your mental sanity.
Ads are not an inevitability.
The only problem is that it will be fought tooth and nail by the incumbents, that "incidentally" also control all the propaganda diffusion channels needed to brainwash us into refusing such a change.
It would take a radical shift in humanity to get this far.
A man can dream.
I propose a new natural law: every medium that can carry advertisements, will.
Exhibit A: gasoline pumps. Why do those have ads? I'm already paying for gas. And I can't even run away.
YT needs a button to the effect of "I will never, ever, EVER, buy or use this product, stop spending money on this ad"
the obviously-AI created slop or the mobile games that I will never play, etc. is just a waste of time for basically everyone (except YT making that money, I guess)
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"