Blackmist@feddit.uk 4 months ago
When you browse Netflix, they use different thumbnails for the movies depending on the profile they’ve made for you. Even if it’s as blatant as “white person from the movie”/“black person from the movie”. If you ignore a movie for long enough, sometimes they even swap it out for a different image to trick you into watching it.
I’m amazed that YouTube doesn’t try and do this somehow. Instead, every video somehow has the same stupid thumbnails of arrows, meaningless text and gormless faces, and I hate it.
But then I block all ads anyway, so it may be that they’re actively trying to make me go away.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 4 months ago
They do exactly this. You’ve never seen the same video appear twice, and the second time it has a different title and thumbnail? That’s how they figured out how effective clickbait is.
SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 months ago
YouTube let’s creators A/B test different thumbnails, but they can’t upload a bunch of them to feed to different demographics or automatically cycle them like Netflix does. I’m sure that’s coming though.
Omniraptor@lemm.ee 4 months ago
To be fair it’s not a mysterious “they”, it’s just an option available for channel owners to set alternative thumbnails and then check which does better.
helenslunch@feddit.nl 4 months ago
I thought it was pretty clear that “they” = YouTube…
antmzo220@lemmy.ml 4 months ago
It’s not YouTube though, it’s the YouTuber