Hyderabad: YouTube is preparing to make the advertisement experience on the platform a lot more frustrating for viewers and quite delightful for advertisers. Celebrating its 20th birthday with a Brandcast event in New York, the video platform announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) feature called Peak Points that lets brands make the most out of their ad money on YouTube.
In a blog post, YouTube detailed Peak Points as a new product built with Gemini, which identifies the most meaningful or “peak” moment within a YouTube video and places the brand advertisement when audiences are the most engaged. This means the advertisement will appear right before the most crucial moment in the video.
YouTube also shared a demo of the new feature where Gemini was able to pinpoint an ad window right before a person proposes to his girlfriend. YouTube did not specify whether it tracks user behaviour, such as pausing a video at a specific spot or rewinding to a certain moment, to find the most appropriate place to put the advertisement slot. However, a CNBC report mentions that Gemini analyses the video frame-by-frame and goes through the transcript of the video to find the most crucial or climactic moment in the video.
Even though YouTube is witnessing an increase in its subscriber numbers, advertisements remain the biggest source of income for the video platform. Ads also empower creators on YouTube as the platform shares a portion of such earnings with channels that are part of the YouTube Partner Program.
The new Peak Points feature is an extension of YouTube's ongoing efforts to maximise its ad revenue. The company had placed ads at the beginning of the videos, added unskippable ads, started pushing multiple ads together, placed ads at the end of the videos, and even stopped people from using ad blockers. YouTube is reportedly working to bring new kinds of advertisements that would appear when a user pauses a video. This could work similarly to how apps like MX Player show a pop-up-like ad when a video is paused.
