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Narrowcasting on Youtube


The discussion of narrowcasting we had in class reminded me of this fascinating video on the surprisingly complex process which determines what ad you see when you click on a video on Youtube. The short version is this: In the millisecond between you clicking the video and the ad playing, Youtube's algorithms analyze the video (looking at its title, views, comments, etc.) and analyze you (trying to determine your age, gender, location, etc. based on your watch history) and then give those pieces of information to the algorithms of the advertisers, which have been programmed to target certain kinds of videos and specific viewer demographics. The advertiser algorithms then hold an auction to determine what commercial you see when the video loads.

While this process is certainly useful for Youtube, advertisers and content creators, it has some disturbing implications. If you and someone else watch the exact same video, you may well see completely different ads. This, as with all narrowcasting, contributes to the breakdown of our culture into sub-groups of similar people who consume the same media, see the same ads, and have increasingly limited knowledge of the other sub-cultures. This kind of division contributed to the outcome of the last presidential election, as people split into self-contained bubbles where they were exposed only to information from their side.

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  1. Sebastian BabinDecember 11, 2017 at 7:47 AM

    I remember hearing about this a while ago but I thought that it was not that big of a deal on Youtube. Also it seems strange that Youtube has struggled so much in the past at putting ads in the places where they need to be and not where they shouldn't be when they do this with all of their consumers.

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  2. Jacob DeanDecember 11, 2017 at 5:18 PM

    Eh, it's not that surprising to me. Computer programs are very bad at the kind of thinking necessary to categorize Youtube videos.

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