These days I think about 15% of the thumbnails I see are gaping mouth. That would be easy to tweak down by stopping with watching LTT.
There is plenty of space for quality and thought out content on YouTube. Especially if you don't need to make a living. The kicker to me, seems the extra time required to get production value to a tolerable point.
Presumably if you're allowed to write a blog even though it's boring etc etc you're also well within your rights to not gape all over your YouTube thumbnail.
Good question. Let me scroll through my YouTube home page. This is every video where the cover image shows the presenter’s face and the presenter is making a natural facial expression. Sometimes the presenter’s mouth is slightly open because they are talking, but they are not outright “soyfacing” as it’s sometimes called.
So that’s 16 normal facial expressions, four slightly exaggerated ones, and 1, maybe 2 soyfaces. And a much larger majority of videos that didn’t show the presenter’s face on the thumbnail at all.
Edit: It occurs to me now that it’s not that easy to see a YouTube thumbnail after you click through to the actual video.
There is plenty of space for quality and thought out content on YouTube. Especially if you don't need to make a living. The kicker to me, seems the extra time required to get production value to a tolerable point.