Hacker News Reader

Comment by segphault | Hacker News Reader

I routinely see ads for fake medical treatments that they refuse to take these down when I report them despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies. So many of the ads on YouTube are for things that are obviously sketchy that when I see a new product I'm not familiar with for the first time in YouTube ad I just assume it is a scam.

It's crazy because YouTube has probably more information about the sort of products that I actually want to buy than probably any other company besides Shopify. About a quarter of what I watch are literally just product reviews. They have a ton of high-intent purchasing signal for reputable products, and instead they are showing me ads for trash. I know it doesn't have to be this way, because Instagram somehow manages to show me highly relevant ads for stuff that I've actually gone on to purchase after discovering there.

View on HN

> They have a ton of high-intent purchasing signal for reputable products, and instead they are showing me ads for trash.

This shouldn't be surprising. Ad placement is based on who pays to be placed in front of certain audiences. It doesn't matter if you're really into hi-fi amplifiers if no hi-fi company placed ads for that audience segment or if the hi-fi companies were outspent by boner pill salesmen.

Google is not optimizing for relevance but for revenue.

All the more reason for me to block ads. If relevance were the optimizing metric, I might see ads for things I'm truly interested in, but if YouTube is only showing me the highest paying ads and it doesn't care how relevant those ads are to me, they are just noise I need to ignore or block.

Especially when they are mostly scams and trash paying to be in front of my eyeballs. I have no desire or obligation to be propagandized, tricked, or misled by bad ads just so I can watch a video I actually am interested in.

> despite the fact that the ads obviously violate Google's policies

There's no contradiction here. Google's policies exist primarily in service of keeping their platforms safe for advertisers. The ads aren't placed on other ads though, so there's no reason for them to stress much about maintaining the same quality in their ads as the content being monetized.

As for targeting, they're just optimizing for CPM. If advertisers for scammy junk pay more than advertisers for things you might like to buy, then you get what you see now. There's always another mark for the scams.

Your ad could follow another ad which might be scammy. If the concerns about an ad appearing next to controversial content that they do not want to be associated with is legit, then why would that not be a concern for following scammy ads as well?

Product reviews are useless these days. Every single one they give a glowing review because there is this fear of alienating the manufacturer and not getting future product to review. I haven’t seen an actual critical review in years probably. They are all these ads with a layer of separation to fool you.

Yeah, it used to be bad enough. Now it’s terrible. Almost no reviews can be trusted now because the market power of reviewers has been eroded to the point where producers can and do treat any individual reviewer, and all of them in aggregate, as extensions of their own marketing departments. The powerless “reviewers” let this happen because if they go against the grain, they’ll be blacklisted and become even more irrelevant. I’m extremely selective these days about whose advice I place any trust in. I’ve found that I frequently wait on new products until they e been in real people’s hands for a bit and then search for their complaints.

I literally saw an ad that was telling me than an average penis is too small to please my partner. I watched just long enough to confirm that was the message because I could not believe it was that blatant, so I assume the pitch coming was some sort of penis enlargement scam, but I just couldn't watch farther. I don't have any real insecurity in that area, but I can imagine that in my younger days it could have been effective, and I imagine that it can be extremely effective on many men.

Google has come quite a long way from "don't be evil".

I've gotten a few ones that told me that vision problems have nothing to do with your eyes. It said that the problem was entirely neurological, and if you keep trying to hide from the issue by wearing glasses, your family would put you in a nursing home. No, I'm not kidding. The "cure" they were selling was some sort of vitamin, which was certainly untested and unregulated. Truly awful stuff.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com