Black Mirror eat your heart out.
Adverts are everywhere. They have been for centuries, but with more devices and more platforms, they’re inescapable.
From Netflix and Amazon charging for ad-free streaming to Instagram testing ‘unskippable’ ads, things really feel like they’re getting a little out of control.
So you can understand why social media lost its mind at a screenshot appearing to show that Google’-owned’s YouTube will now make you rewatch an advert if it spots you weren’t really paying attention.
What seems to be a pop-up message reads ‘Please maintain eye contact for the duration of the ad’, with an eye icon above.
Beneath that it says: ‘Since you looked away, you’ll need to rewatch from the beginning.’
Very Black Mirror.
Also, very fake.
It was created by web designer Soren Iverson, who is no stranger to mocking up ideas for tech brands, such as ‘Uber quiet game’, where you ‘get a free ride if your driver speaks’.
Thankfully, most people who saw his latest creation quickly realised it was fake, but still weren’t impressed, with many pleading for him to delete the post.
Aaron Erickson, a senior engineering manager at AI chip maker Nvidia, wrote on X: ‘Stop giving them ideas sir… I think I have already seen this kind of tech in mandatory training videos for onboarding at some companies.’
Engineering student Ian Zelbo joked: ‘A Google intern was just assigned this.’
Product designer István took it one step further.
‘Premium subscriptions will have ads without eye contact,’ he wrote. ‘Premium+ will have no ads.’
Another X user said: ‘Imagine u don’t know how to do CPR and u get a ad then u have to watch it again.’
However, while advertisers aren’t yet hijacking cameras to check you’re watching, on desktops, many websites stop playing an ad if you click off the page to another tab or window, so you can’t keep playing it in the background.
Which only seems a few steps away from Soren’s idea…
