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.
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.
Omniraptor@lemm.ee 1 week ago
helenslunch@feddit.nl 1 week ago
To be fair it’s not a mysterious “they”
I thought it was pretty clear that “they” = YouTube…
antmzo220@lemmy.ml 1 week ago
It’s not YouTube though, it’s the YouTuber
SilentStorms@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week 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.