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by jrockway
1675 days ago
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I'm not convinced that it's optimized in any way. Linus claims to have A/B tested it, but changing the thumbnails disturbs the experiment too much (different time of day, Youtube knows that you changed the thumbnail and probably uses that information for something, CDN lag, who knows what else), and the sample size is too small to be statistically meaningful. I watch a ton of YouTube and exaggerated facial expressions in thumbnails are rare in the channels I watch. The channels don't seem to be suffering for it, many have subscriber counts in the millions. I even have a concrete head-to-head example. Every Saturday morning, two channels I watch (clough42 and blondihacks) both post videos. YouTube puts them at the top of recommended every Saturday without fail. clough42 uses his face in the thumbnails, blondihacks uses a picture of her project. Both get recommended. Both channels have grown dramatically over the last year. As far as I can tell, YouTube considers them equally good. On the other hand, I might not be the target demographic for "I cobbled together a bunch of computer shit" videos (which is kind of LTT's and Jeff Geerling's shtick). So maybe it's the right optimization for that kind of channel. (But if you want revenue, then your sponsors probably want me watching the video and not 13 year old kids with no money. Just saying.) I will conclude that I pretty much won't click videos like this. Seeing the inside of someone's mouth in a computing video basically says to me "look, the content isn't very good, but I know how to play the game". This is unfair (Jeff, your content is fine), but it's how I feel. It's like seeing the first Google result for "foo bar" being "Cheap Foo Bars Foo Bar Food Bar Foo Bar Compatible With Quuxgorch". I'm not going to click it. You may have won the algorithm, but you didn't win me. |
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So I bet it does result in higher views, just children viewing it.
Doesn't mean you should do it though, maybe try having some dignity.