YouTube Ads Are About to Get Even More Annoying
Has this ever happened to you? You’re completely engrossed in a video – maybe the punchline of a great joke is about to hit, or you’re finally about to learn the answer to some big mystery – and just as everything is about to get going well, bam: an annoying ad interrupts and leaves you disappointed.
Ads are a necessary part of a free internet, but that doesn’t justify how annoying they can be. No one wants to be cut off from a video by ads just when interest levels are at their peak, even though that’s what will happen to all your YouTube videos.
As Mashable reports , it’s all part of a new feature called Peak Points that YouTube announced during its Upfront presentation on Wednesday . Peak Points uses Google’s Gemini AI model to find “the most meaningful or ‘peak’ moments” to interrupt videos with ads. It’s unclear what data Gemini will use to make its decisions, but consider that your behavior is being monitored by Google’s AI when you play a YouTube video.
YouTube knows that viewers will be most engaged with a video at these moments, and by strategically placing ads there, it increases the likelihood that the viewer will engage with that ad, making more money for both YouTube and the creator. And there is some logic to that. But it also means that placing ads in YouTube videos is about to get really annoying. Every interesting, funny, annoying, or otherwise emotional video on the site will have an ad placed at its “peak.” I wouldn’t be surprised if after a while you just feel those commercial breaks coming.
How to Bypass Annoying YouTube Ads
There are a few workarounds. YouTube’s solution, of course, is to subscribe to YouTube Premium . For $13.99 a month, you can watch videos virtually ad-free, among other subscriber-only benefits . Alternatively, you can use an ad blocker to, well, block those ads. YouTube can use whatever AI model it wants to place ads at the most strategic moments, but it’s all for naught if you just block those ads from showing.
However, the situation is not as simple as it once was. YouTube and Google have declared war on ad blockers, neutralizing popular options like uBlock Origin in Chrome and finding new ways to prevent users who use ad blockers from watching YouTube. Still, there are always ways to get around YouTube’s tactics .