You're About To See YouTube Thumbnails Start Changing

I spent like an hour on the fake screenshot at 0:03 please like :_ThioJoeAHHH:

Glad to see the thumbnail with the guy making a dumb face didn't perform well. I hate this trend of putting a dumb face on thumbnails, it feels like the most disgusting clickbait.

This has been happening all the time in the last 2 years

I would test with three nearly identical thumbnails to see if it really would be 33% for each.

Interesting fact: Sometims when you add a video with multiple thumbnails in a playlist. One thumbnail is displayed as the playlist thumbnail and the second as the thumbnail for the video.

I usually don't put a lot of thought when looking at thumbnails. I read the title or sometimes just look to see who posted and how much time i have when I see it. 🙂 Everyone have a wonderful day.

I've always been suspicious of A/B testing thumbnails, because there's just far too many variables behind why someone clicks on a thing for you to just be able to split the viewer group and get actionable or insightful data There's no way to know how much those discrepancies in thumbnail was pure coincidence, we don't even have a clue what the margin of error is on this. I think it's worth taking in this kind of information with a grain of salt

For channels I watch regularly, The thumbnail doesn't matter to me at all. If ThioJoe uploads a video, I look at the title to see if I want to watch it (Which usually I do) and I completely ignore the thumbnail. I do that for all channels I am subscribed to. I couldn't tell you if it changed, because I don't see the thumbnail in the first place. The only times it makes a difference in how I interact with videos is when I look for videos from channels I don't know yet. There the thumbnail might give me an idea of how much work they put in and what kind of style to expect and stuff like that.

I recently started using DeArrow to force classic random thumbnails like old YouTube to get away from all the advertisement-like thumbnails these days. It also uses crowd sourced titles to combat clickbait.

I miss early YouTube when the thumbnail was just a frame from the video

DeArrow is a must nowadays, video titles and thumbnails cant be trusted anymore.

I sincerely hope the content consumers of youtube tactically use this feature. I'll be trying to delay clicking on a video I see where the thumbnail is of the creator with the click-bait-y 'shocked' face that I'm just so sick of. And wait until a more appropriate thumbnail shows.

I have an extension that just forces the autogenerated thumbnails from the middle of the video, it's nice.

So that's why Good Mythical Morning will have video thumbnails change several times

Wait till people hear that they are constantly in some a/b test experiments in almost every single application or bigger website they use

They should let viewers vote and also choose "I hate them all"

Thanks for the heads up! 👍

Im becoming more convinced that eventually youtube will develop thumbnail profiles for people and dynamically match a thumbnail to a user.

Really annoying feature honestly, now people can really optimize their nonsense clickbait. Thankfully, de-arrow exists.

Yeah I've seen nany channels do this - the thumbnail changing from when i first see it to when i see it on watch later, etc. it changes the title used as well.