App: YouTube
Ad: Netflix
Targeted: No
YouTube, owned by Google, is one of the more unpredictable apps when it comes to ads. I use it every day on my laptop, which has an ad-blocker installed, so I don't see ads on there, but if I'm using my phone or my Chromecast then ads do occasionally appear between videos. Before getting to a video though, there's always an ad at the top of my YouTube app homepage, so let's take a look at that:
The ad is paid for by "New Sofa Search" and offers to find me "the best sofas on a clearance sale". Now, I'm not looking for a new sofa at the moment, never mind the absolute unit in the photograph, and it would be wild for me to purchase one just for the sake of an experiment like this. However, I've never clicked on a YouTube ad before, so I had a look to see where it went.
I ended up on a dodgy-looking site called "bestsearches.net" which offered me a list of different sofa types ("modern sleeper sofa", "white sectional leather sofas" etc) and then when clicking on one of those, I go to a Yahoo search which shows me "ads related to" the category I selected. I find this really curious - YouTube is owned by Google, but the advert on the homepage is for some sort of search engine which then leads to a Yahoo search which in turn is powered by Bing, aka Google's arch nemesis? Utterly bizarre.
Anyway, as I said, I have no interest in purchasing a sofa so I moved on to the first video on my feed, or in this case the first 'YouTube mix', to see whether I can find an ad attached to it. Eagle-eyed readers will spot that the first YouTube mix starts with a New Order song; it's apparently "My Mix" but YouTube honestly puts the same few videos at the top of every mix so it doesn't really matter. For what it's worth, I didn't have a problem clicking to listen to Age Of Consent since it's one of my favourite songs of all time.
There was no ad before the video, but there was a little yellow marker at the end of the video progress bar which I thought meant that an advert is placed there. Apparently I was wrong because the playlist went right on to the next song. After the third, I did see an advert but it was literally just the YouTube logo for a few seconds before moving on. Finally, after 6 videos, I got an advert!
The ad was for Netflix, more specifically, it was an ad for Netflix containing the trailer for The Irishman. The Irishman is a Scorsese movie that was released on Netflix a month or two ago and I already know a couple of things about it: it has some weird CGI to de-age the actors, it's a typical Scorsese gangster movie, and it's over three hours long. I already know that this movie is not going to spark joy in me so I'm making the decision not to waste three hours of my life on it.
However, since I already have a Netflix subscription, lets instead see what it would like me to watch today. For those of you not familiar with Netflix, when you open the site it has a 'Spotlight' show or movie that appears as the page header - usually it's something that's newly released and, more often than not, it's a "Netflix Original" aka something released exclusively on Netflix. If you scroll on, it offers shows and movies under categories, like 'recently added', 'acclaimed UK TV shows', 'romantic movies' and so on.
Today, the Spotlight is on a show called You, which has just released a second series.
I haven't seen You before but I've heard of it. It's a Netflix-exclusive series that I remember seeing advertised on the Spotlight when the first series came out, and I was mildly interested in watching but was watching a few other shows at the time. I've also seen a bit of content around it recently - Buzzfeed quizzes, that sort of thing - to coincide with the new series. I don't know much about the plotline but from what I understand it centres on a man who has decided to pursue a girl he likes by stalking her, and there was a bit of controversy when it first came out in case people thought it was a sweet love story and not genuinely terrifying.
Netflix implores me to "Watch Season 2 Now", but as I'm new to the show, I started with Series 1 Episode 1. Knowing even the small amount that I did about it, I was paying attention right away and looking for warning signs that this might not be the fluffy romantic story that I often turn to on Netflix (their teen movies are a guilty pleasure of mine) and it didn't take long for the episode to lay out its premise: this guy is bad news. I won't say anything to spoil it for those who haven't seen any of it yet, but I will say that I enjoyed it and will definitely continue watching.
I might have cheated a little bit by not watching what social media advertised to me, but this is my experiment and therefore my rules. I don't know whether YouTube's advertising is particularly targeted. On the one hand, the sofa search ad was pretty abstract and bizarre, and doesn't match up with anything I watch there, but I do use YouTube to watch movie trailers so it's possible that the Netflix ad was at least somewhat aimed at me. I do occasionally watch Netflix on my computer through a browser that's linked to my Google account, so if it collects data on me then it knows I have a Netflix account and haven't watched The Irishman. When it comes to Netflix, it wants me to think that its recommendations are targeted at me. When I clicked on You it told me the series was a "99% match" for me, but honestly every time I see that 'match' bar it's usually set at 99% so I don't know whether I trust it. I think the Spotlight is the same for every user so it might be coincidental that today it's offering me a show I actually wanted to watch, but if I get any more Netflix ads when I'm browsing my socials, maybe I'll get to test that theory.
No comments:
Post a Comment