r/technology • u/Dilpickle2113 • 10h ago

Social Media YouTube is testing hiding the dislike button entirely and users aren’t happy

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtube-is-testing-hiding-the-dislike-button-entirely-and-users-arent-happy-3420822/
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u/JurplePesus 10h ago

You will watch what the algorithm feeds you and you'll like it! Now shut up and click on this AI ad for a gambling app or some prescriptions from an online doctor who will never meet you.

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u/toddh39 10h ago

All the fake ai ads scams on you tube

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u/Maelstrom52 9h ago

It's unbelievably annoying, but I will say part of the problem is that YouTube has democratized the advertising structure on YouTube, so pretty much anyone can purchase ad space on YouTube. It's super easy to do. Almost none of those ads are reserve ads, they're all auction ads, which basically means that they just get placement in places where they probably aren't going to have that much of an impact. I would wager that almost everyone clicks the skip after five seconds button. The conversion rates on those things are probably well below 0.1%, whereas decent conversion rates would be between 1-2%

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u/dychronalicousness 9h ago

Which it’s wild advertisers haven’t thrown a shit fit over artificially inflated numbers due to bots.

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u/Maelstrom52 9h ago

There are two different advertising buckets though. Advertisers with money, who are spending several hundred thousand or millions of dollars per month, are absolutely getting premier placement. 15-second unskippable ads and 30-second unskippable ads are priced very differently than TrueView skippable ads. It only costs a fraction of the reserve ad cost to throw a bunch of AI ads and try to get some exposure.

And also, considering the average person on Reddit is under 35 and probably not making over $100,000 a year, the likelihood that you're seeing more of the auction ads is probably part and parcel to your demographics.

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u/baconboner69xD 9h ago

My favorite is when I’m driving or working outside and it starts playing an ad that is essentially endless unless I find my phone and skip it. Like wtf

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u/Maelstrom52 8h ago

Yeah, it's actually something that really bothers me about YouTube's laissez faire system. There are aspects of it that I really appreciate, but it would be nice if they capped the lengths of skippable ads to like 3-4 mins. But part of the reason why they don't is that there's actually a utility for ad agencies and creators. For example, if a branded video falls short of its expected VG (View Guarantee), sometimes you can do what an agency will refer to as "social promotion" which is basically just "buying" the views in order to satisfy the agreement. Usually, a video has to at least have satisfied 75-80% of its guarantee before they will do it, so it's usually just done if the videos falls slightly short of its goal. It's worth noting that most brand deals consider 90% of a VG as "satisfied". So, let's say you guarantee 100K views over 30 days, and at day 20, it's at 80K views. You can use "social promotion" to grab the last 10K, and they usually do it on the cheap which means placement in non-US territories.

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u/Residenthuman101 2h ago

So they know no one is actually watching these twelve hour ads but there enough pets and background music playing YouTube accounts out there in the world that they found a way to sell fake views to their own creators to help game the system they themselves control lol

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u/QuackNate 5h ago

A fifteen hour picture of a gambling site with the Joker violin screech playing on loop.

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u/Heronymous-Anonymous 7h ago

Theres also no way YouTube is hiding their real engagement metrics from companies like Nielsen. Big ad companies who do marketing for Fortune 500 companies demand, and get, the real data that they base their marketing on. They’re not stupid enough to take Facebook, Google, or any other social media platform’s word when it comes to where and how they spend their millions.

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u/RyuNoKami 7h ago

As long as they are getting paid, they wouldn't care much but the companies that are selling the products, they should be caring.