this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
25 points (96.3% liked)

No Stupid Questions

39672 readers
1067 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here. This includes using AI responses and summaries.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

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:

  1. Random chance.
  2. 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.
  3. 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...

top 25 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Ideonek@lemm.ee 14 points 3 days ago (1 children)

There is simpler explanation. People who watched this video acvtualy buy the product more often then people who didn't.

So it flaged you as someone potentially interested and selected you when advertisers chose to target people similar to their actuall historical clients.

(I'm not saying they don't scan videos. I'm saying they don't have to do it to achieve effect like this)

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone -2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

I doubt this because it is not a product people would buy in any volume, and was just used to illustrate a random point. Also the video has been out less than 24 hours. I don't think it's likely in this case.

But on the other hand, if millions of people watch something, I guess some percentage will buy the thing they see... huh.

Thanks for this suggestion.

Wait a second, how would Anker/Amazon know that people who watch the video are likely to buy that item? Would Google send Amazon the exact watch history of each customer and they identify videos in common?

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

YouTube doesn't share exact user info. But, google ads platform does have the metrics and can show the Amazon seller statistics of interest when buying ad prints on YouTube videos. Like search terms and referral links click right after or before the video played.

This happens automatically and virtually without human intervention though. It's just bots talking to bots talking to bots. It all happens in milliseconds after you click play. By the time your web browser has started loading the player, yt opened a bid for the ad spot, thousands of companies chose to bid on that video based on a myriad of parameters and statistics, a winner was chosen based on pledged money, then a video ad is loaded to the server ready to play.

GAds assigns every video several keywords, based on information from the uploader, then watches user behavior to assign meta tags. Videos are scanned, to search for curse words, nudity, copyright and other offending material automatically. I don't think they scan for objects shown in the video to assign tags about the kind of product, but it's not out of the realm of possibility.

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It's interesting to me that they scan the video, and then know that I watched it (on tubular) when I'm visiting a completely unrelated website in a different browser, and serve me an ad there.

[–] dustyData@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is what the big deal about cookies and privacy is all about.

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Yeah I'm just not sure how it has cookies since I used tubular...

[–] algorithmae@lemmy.sdf.org 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Fingerprinting. If they don't have a cookie, they'll link other information that they have to figure out with pretty decent accuracy who you are

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 2 days ago

This must be it. Especially since they have my IP address it must be an easy fingerprint

[–] Toes@ani.social 15 points 3 days ago (1 children)

It does digest what's being said in the video and compare it to the other videos you watch. To better personalize your experience.

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 points 3 days ago

It's definitely personalized, even though I had turned all of that off, since tubular interacts with YouTube without logging in.

[–] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Google scans YouTube videos for information about what products appear in them

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)

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 10 points 3 days ago (1 children)

The words in the video are certainly captured. The guy didn’t say what is was or put it in the video’s description?

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

No, but there was text on screen in the video saying what it was, and that it wasn't an endorsement.

Here's the section in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc&t=2999

He doesn't speak its name, it's just visible on screen.

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

One thought would be comments. People could have talked about the product there

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I haven't seen it in the comments yet, except for my comment that I had seen an ad for it.

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I mean, there’s 6000 comments lol

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

It was on screen for a few seconds and not the point of the video.

[–] jeffw@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Still, doesn’t seem crazy for a few comments to be about it

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago

It does to me, but ymmv. On the other hand there is at least one now because I made one.

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 2 points 3 days ago

Is it an Anker? Because I see an Anker on that timestamp. If so, seems it's the same for everyone? So just a coincidence as I suspected. Let me know if I'm misunderstanding.

[–] FeelzGoodMan420@eviltoast.org 7 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

My guess is it's coincidence and that the powerbank company has just paid for a lot of ad space recently for similar topics. See if you can confidently reproduce it a few times. If so, I'll change my opinion.

I'm only saying this because I have never once had this happen. However my mobile browser clears history every time on close. Does yours? I personally disabled "Android System Intelligence" as that's responsible for a lot of app personalization on Android phones.

Could also be that you have some sorta BS toggle turned on on your Android phone where it personalizes ads. You may want to check.

[–] stsquad@lemmy.ml 7 points 3 days ago

Do you think there is information YouTube wouldn't collect about you even if they could be better at selling ads to people based on it?

Do you live somewhere with data protection laws? If so you could request a dump of all personally identifying data they hold on you.

[–] vxx@lemmy.world 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

There's a fourth Option.

It could be a new marketing strategy. Post and push a video on Lemmy that involves a power bank, and advertise said power bank also on Lemmy.

It's a bit of an odd Video anyways to make it to the front of Lemmy, especially considering that long videos usually never make it to the front.

[–] sem@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Neither the video, nor the ad were on Lemmy. The ad was an automated ad on a random article I found on Lemmy. The kind where behind the scenes, the ad vendor auctions off the space and your information to the bot that's the highest bidder