Ok, so. Earlier today I was watching the Technology Connections video about how Power is energy over time. In the video he shows a picture of an Anker Solix powerbank to illustrate the concept of energy storage. I’ve never seen or heard of this product before.
An hour later I’m reading an article on Lemmy, and there is an ad for that same powerbank.
What explains this? Some explanations I can think of:
- Random chance.
- Google scans YouTube videos for information about what products appear in them, and knows that I watched the video, and that I’m the same person now reading the article. It then gives this information to everyone in the ad-selling marketplace, so the Anker ad company can bid high to show me an ad.
- Google is observing what appears on my screen in order to sell this info to advertisers.
I think 2 is most likely given Occam’s Razor, but I didn’t think Google scanned yt videos like this.
Is there something I’m missing?
I was watching on an Android phone, on Tubular. My browser is IronFox. I’m surprised that Google can follow my activity from one app to the other… this is probably based on IP address, but I wonder what other device fingerprinting tubular and IronFox expose…
Yes, but not specifically looking for products. They’re scanning to try to learn everything about the video with the goal of better matching suggestions to the interests (as determined by watch history) of viewers.
The intention is (as always) to increase viewer session time because the more time viewers spend on the platform, the more ads they see and ultimately the more money YouTube makes.
Of course, that scanning and view history can also be used to target ads with the goal of increasing ad click-thru and conversion (ultimately also driving the profit goal)
I guess it’s in the same category as those automatic ads that say “cop this look” and offer to sell you products that appear in a photo on a website.