Have you ever gone through the frustration of having your YouTube binge interrupted by the ever-annoying Ads? I am most certain you have. It suffices to say, I will go on a limb here and use a sweeping statement, everyone hates Ads. I bet right now you have an Adblocker or more specifically a YouTube AdBlocker installed on your browser. If you are not the tech-savvy type and you do not have an Adblocker installed I bet those 5 seconds of an Ad playing before you can skip can be dreadful.
Every time I use a new device, a personal one, one of the very first things I do is sign in on my browser. I do this for two reasons, to populate my browser settings and extensions across all devices I use and to simplify my browsing experience. One of the extensions I have installed is a YouTuber Adblocker. However, I recently deactivated the extension because I have had a change of heart, turns out I love Ads.
This article is not about Ads, however, it is about the beauty of algorithms and why you should take advantage of them to get the best out of your streaming, binging, and browsing experience. In dumbed-down terms, an algorithm is a specific procedure for solving a well-defined computational problem.
The works of algorithms
I am fairly certain you have been thrown back, or even amazed by the intuitiveness of some algorithms on the internet. Perhaps you did not know it was the work of an algorithm but you were blown away nonetheless. The reaction for most might be “wow, how did it know?” Before I dive into explaining how algorithms on the internet work let me first give you a brief recap of why you should sign in on some of the accounts you use most, like Google and YouTube, most importantly the advantage of having one account for everything to simplify your life.
Why sign in to Google
Your Google Account gives you access to helpful features like Autofill, personalized recommendations, and much more – anytime on any device. Your Google Account helps you save time by automatically filling in passwords, addresses, and payment details using the information you’ve saved to your account.
Our lives today run on the internet, we have online accounts for literally everything we can think of: social media, favorite newspaper subscriptions, online bank accounts, housing bills, and school and work-related accounts to name just a few. All of these accounts will need to be well secured to prevent any loss of data or worse, being hacked.
According to research, an overwhelming number of people reuse passwords. It is common to find someone using a pet name, nickname, or birthday as a password in over 20 or so online accounts. From a security point of view, this is a terrible practice. However, it is also understandable why some people may do it. No one takes joy in memorizing over 20-something complex passwords they use no more than once a month, maybe. With a Google account, you don’t have to do that anymore.
When you sign in with your Google Account on your browser what happens is the next time you fill in a password you are prompted if you would like Google to save your password. Now, I feel I have to demystify something here. When you save a password with Google, it is not saved on the browser which can be a security risk on its own, it is saved with your Google Account instead. If you are security conscious like myself and you are still worried this is not safe, you should check out Two Factor Authentication (2FA) which you must be using by now anyway. When you have this set you no longer have to use the same password on 20 online accounts, you should use unique and complex passwords that make it harder for intruders to get into your data. The best part is you never have to worry about remembering the password ever again because Google will autofill it for you the next time it is required.
The single biggest reason though to use a Google Account is so that you can use that account to create other accounts. Nowadays most online services provide you with several authentication tools including logging in with either Google or Facebook, these two being the most popular. The advantage of using this approach is that you no longer have to create new independent accounts with their own usernames and passwords every time you create a new account. When you create a new account using a 3rd party authenticator such as Google or Facebook, what happens is your login credentials will be the same as that particular authentication provider. This is where the beauty of algorithms comes into play through information exchange.
Why sign in to YouTube
Signing in to YouTube with your Google Account can help you find the content you like, connect with the YouTube community, and more. The experience of signing in on YouTube grants you access to see more from your favorite channels by subscribing, creating, and sharing playlists which helps you quickly find and watch your favorite videos and have the option to get notified when new videos are uploaded.
Try getting on to YouTube without being signed in, it’s very chaotic to an organized mind. There’s just about anything and everything with the hope that something might pique your curiosity. Now sign in, ah that feel of familiarity, your type of stuff right there in front of you perfectly organized and ready for you to click play.
The not so annoying Ads, apparently
Google leverages its search, web browsing, mobile operating systems, and cloud computing to make money through the sale of advertising and various service fees. Advertising generates the majority of their revenue. These ads are not the annoying type of pop-up ads you are thinking of. Google built a new type of advertising called text ads and it’s so freaking intuitive that you already love it.
Sophisticated algorithms learn more about individuals as we interact with the algorithm. The ads you see on the web pages you visit are mostly relevant to you because they are based on the search engine’s understanding of you.
The Google Recommendations page looks at your account’s performance history, your campaign settings, and trends across Google to automatically generate recommendations that could improve your performance.
Each recommendation provides customized suggestions to help increase your campaigns’ performance. Recommendations can introduce you to new, relevant features, help you get more out of your budget by improving your bidding, keywords, and ads, and can work to increase the overall performance and efficiency of your campaigns.
So why did I deactivate the YouTube Adblocker?
To be fair, without having Google admit it to me, I know Google knows I studied IT, I am a software developer, an avid reader, and a blogger with a deep passion for science, technology, engineering, professional growth, and everything to do with rockets and Space. I would go on a limb here and say perhaps Google can do a better job of characterizing us as individuals than we would do ourselves.
Algorithms learn from past behavior to better understand and predict our next actions. Taking advantage of that, Google’s algorithms from their Ads recommendation engine, search prediction engine, YouTube recommendation algorithm, and YouTube Ads recommendation system have reached a very high level of sophistication that the interruptions in between videos can almost be forgiven. At times the Ads we encounter are the very thing we are in need of without being aware.
Soon after deactivating my Youtube Adblocker, I saw ads for content I was in search of. I came across an Ad for a McKinsey Professionals development program, Forward, very relevant to me. I also saw an ad from Anywr, an agency that helps software developers in securing remote jobs in Europe. I also saw a Mindvalley Ad because I am a huge fan of Vishen Lakshiani’s book “The Code of the Extraordinary Mind”. These ads are so on point I felt compelled to write about algorithms to inspire someone out there to tailor making their browsing, streaming, and binging experience.
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