iWorld
Google rolls out AR effect tools for YouTube Stories
MUMBAI: With the overwhelming popularity of Stories feature on social media platforms, the companies are leaving no stones unturned to make it more attractive. Now, Google is rolling out support for its advanced Augmented Reality (AR) effect tools for YouTube Stories while its rival Facebook and Instagram already support AR filters for Stories on their platforms.
The new feature will allow users to add animated masks, glasses, 3D hats and more such objects to their selfies. "To make all this possible, we employ machine learning (ML) to infer approximate 3D surface geometry to enable visual effects and ML pipeline for Selfie AR," Google Artificial Intelligence research engineers Artsiom Ablavatski and Ivan Grishchenko wrote in a blog post on Saturday.
"That way we can grow our dataset to increasingly challenging cases, such as grimaces, oblique angle and occlusions. Dataset augmentation techniques also expanded the available ground truth data, developing model resilience to artefacts like camera imperfections or extreme lighting conditions," the post added.
The company has also claimed that it will use improved "anchoring" process with the new AR effects to make them look more real and responsive. According to the post, it uses a unique set of technologies "that can track the highly dynamic surface geometry across every smile, frown or smirk."
However, YouTube Stories is not available to every user yet as the tech giant launched the feature last year but only to creators with more than 10k subscribers.
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Netflix ad revenue set to soar past $8bn by 2030, outpacing CTV rivals: Warc
From $1.5bn in 2025 to $8bn in 2030, Netflix is fast becoming a CTV ad powerhouse
MUMBAI: Netflix is turning heads in the advertising world, with forecasts showing its ad revenue set to surpass $8 billion by 2030, outpacing the wider connected TV (CTV) market, according to the latest Warc Media Platform Insights report.
The streaming giant’s advertising journey gained serious momentum in 2025, generating over $1.5 billion, a remarkable increase of more than 2.5 times compared with the previous year. Management aims to roughly double that figure again in 2026, targeting around $3 billion.
Rather than waiting for the market to grow, Netflix is going after a bigger slice of the existing CTV ad pie, and the strategy appears to be paying off. Analysis by Omdia, cited by Warc, predicts Netflix will account for 9.2 per cent of global CTV advertising spend by 2027. By then, the company’s ad growth is projected to hit 58 per cent year-on-year, while the overall CTV market grows at just 9.9 per cent.
CTV may be booming, but traditional TV continues to shrink, losing spend to digital channels and retail media, according to Warc’s latest Global Ad Trends report, Media’s new normal. Despite this, Netflix is focused on monetising its expanding ad inventory with better infrastructure and smarter tools, turning what is currently a small 3 per cent slice of its total revenue into a high-growth engine.
WPP forecasts that Netflix’s $3 billion ad target in 2026 would place it as the 27th-largest global ad seller, just behind French media group RTL. Yet the company sees its relatively modest ad business as an advantage, providing a buffer against market fluctuations while it ramps up operations.
Looking ahead, a potential acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery could give Netflix even more content to offer and bundle, helping to retain subscribers, attract new members, and sustain long-term revenue growth. For now, the platform is quietly staking its claim as a rising star in the CTV advertising arena.
