Is there a way to get Youtube advertising algorithm to show game/movie ads instead of on-line gambling ads?

This advice is a bit incorrect - Turning personalization off is more likely to lead to ads based on pure bidding price. Turning it on is less likely to lead to low quality ads like gambling.

All that said, checking adssettings is a good idea to see what interest profile has been created for you and remove the ones that you don’t want to see

Edit : Actually, just checking it now and it looks like there’s literally a setting to see fewer Gambling & Alcohol ads

About a year ago, Google became extremely certain that I was, like, hella into women’s gymnastics, particularly some retired lady, uh, Nastya Luken? Dunno.

And, like, during the Olympics, yeah, my partner and I absolutely watch gymnastics. That shit is crazy. Some motherfuckin Russian dude just did a standing quintuple flip and was immediate executed by ex-KGB agents cuz he didn’t manage a sextuple that fuckin’ failure. But, you know, after the torch gets doused, I more or less forget the sport exists for the next 3.9 years.

But man, that Google Assistant news ticker thing you can swipe left to see on your Android home screen? That fucker was like, yo, Armando, did you know that today, Nastya wore a pink tracksuit out to get bagels at the corner store cuz she’s just like us? Hey Armando, checkit, Nastya has some tips on breathing you should totally read about here at yogathots daily dot news. ARMANDO YOU WANG DID YOU KNOW THAT LILNASX LOOKIN HAS A THIGH GAP THE SIZE OF COLORADO ANYWAY HERE’S SIX TIPS FOR DOIN BUTT CRUNCHES.

I still don’t know what I did to trip that particular interest category into overdrive. IIRC, Googs and Co. can sometimes build part of your ad profile around what closely-associated people are into (hence a LOT of the “omg they’re listening to meeeeee” fears people give into), but this was like, middle-of-the-pandemic isolation times, and my gf – the only human I’ve interacted with in months – has never even heard of this lady either.

Most shit, I can figure out the connection. “Oh yeah, I googled video game reviews on Youtube a month ago, of course I’m gonna get a bunch of incel Prager U videos now, duh, gamers are incels haha.” But some products of the Google Hivemind? They are mysteries man wasn’t meant to know, Jeff.

Tell ya, though. That lady is definitely hot af!

This. Why are you letting YT play ads.

I haven’t watched an advertisement since 1999.

On a side note, I named one of my network attached storage devices NAStya. The other is NAStassia.

Where do I find this?

I still get these from time to time and they make me furious.

https://adssettings.google.com and scroll all the way down

I think that is more or less what I said? maybe I didn’t phrase it clearly.

I was actually talking to someone who works in SEM earlier today and asked how it works for users with personalization off, her answer was basically “I’m not sure, there aren’t enough of you weirdos to worry about”.

Yep, the general view is anyone who looks for and finds that setting isn’t a customer you want to advertise to anyway. This is very different than the recent change to iOS which prompts the user as to whether they want to allow tracking.

One thing about the algorithms, is that I think they can over-index on novelty. So, if your profile is relatively static (Food blogs + Heavy Metal + Hair care tips), it can desperately want to show you something new, and if it suddenly sees a tiny whiff of a new thing, because of network effects or a random misclick, it can decide that that’s the thing for a while.

I completely understand that, and it isn’t a bad thing, but Google is just so bad at it. The random pick the other day was some reaction video of what looked like a bunch of teen influencer bros. I would never want to watch that.

As much as I hate Facebook, they nail the ads on Instagram, a little too well sometimes. I was Googling scotch, so now I am getting ads for scotch, but usually the ads are completely relevant to my interests. Not only are they relevant, a lot of times they actually get me to check out the ad.