I was watching a video from a new YouTube travel vlogger I’ve started following, and I noticed something interesting. I noticed that as she was setting up her Nature Hike tent, an advertisement for that exact tent showed up on a small bar across the bottom of the video. You can see it up there in that screenshot from YouTube. There’s an ad for the Nature Hike tent running across the bottom of the video screen.
Maybe I just never noticed it before, but this is the first time I’d noticed that type of advertisement. YouTube has gotten so heavily into jamming an ad into every available empty space on a video or on the YouTube page that I see them everywhere. But I don’t think I’d seen an ad here before. And I don’t think I’d noticed such a specific targeted ad.
I don’t know how this new advertisement system works yet. I haven’t done any research. I did notice that this YouTuber has affiliate links for her videos. And in the video description there is a link to her Shopee page and her Amazon page. And if people click on those links and buy any of those products, I’m sure she would get a small commission. That’s a smart thing for a YouTuber to do. And me being not so smart, I’ve never figured out how to do it.
It’s possible that this bar ad at the bottom of her video is showing up because she has Shopee and Amazon affiliate links. But it’s also possible that this now happens on all videos. That seems likely because computers are so powerful now that they can identify anything in a video. And that makes it a no-brainer to then insert an advertisement for that product. It’s essentially the same thing as product placement in a movie. In movies, they deliberately choose which products to put into their movies, and then they are paid by the company for that product placement.
And I can see YouTube moving in that direction and forcing YouTubers to have product placement. For example, I have an Osprey knapsack, and I use it all the time. The YouTube computers can identify what brand of knapsack I am using and then insert an advertisement for Osprey backpacks on the page underneath my video. Will that start to happen all the time? Or does this only happen if the YouTuber puts that knapsack into their affiliate links?
It’s an interesting thought. But it sure begs the question of where YouTube and the Internet in general is going to stop when it comes to inserting ads. Already when you try to read an article on Google, it’s nearly impossible. There are so many ads of so many varieties that it is hard to even find the next paragraph in the article you’re trying to read. And YouTube videos are moving in that direction. There might be a time when the video itself is hard to even locate on the screen because it’s hidden behind so many floating and inserted ads.