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Comment by BitwiseFool | Hacker News Reader

I absolutely loathe YouTube Face. If you've never heard of the term, it's that exaggerated, wide-eyed, often with an open-mouth, expression on most thumbnails. I know that at some psychological level it works, probably because it hijacks the part of our brain that is meant to respond to when a fellow human being in front of us makes that expression - there must be something dangerous going on behind us and we need to pay attention.

Even credible channels do this, Linus Tech Tips has such thumbnails and I'm sure it measurably affects their view count. I just lament how so much of getting people to click on videos has become reduced to the kinds of tricks that work on babies. I mean that literally, if you've ever played with a toddler or seen caretakers playing with them, you'll notice they use the same kind of exaggerated expressions and gesticulation.

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Veritasium has an excellent video exploring this exact topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2xHZPH5Sng

I belive it was tiktok of wendover productions guy (or one them, idk), he said there, that making a typos in videos is one another method of generating views on yt, becouse people likes to point the mistake in comments. And comments generate engagement so yt promotes that video

YouTube Face helps explains the faces in this r/weirddalle post.

https://www.reddit.com/r/weirddalle/comments/vr622j/youtuber...

The problem is that it's not clear (at least to me) whether adding the "Youtube face" is making people click on the videos more, or is it just making YouTube push the video to a wider audience resulting in higher engagement.

Is there some way to assert "Given the same audience of X people, adding such thumbnails results in more clicks"?

I don’t think that the YouTube algorithm pushes videos based on their thumbnails.

It is pretty obvious as a creator. The analytics available encourage experimentation. You find that mentioning subscribing or making a more visually engaging thumbnail will significantly boost important metrics like CTR. CTR is a metric almost entirely dependent on thumbnail image, although title and description play small roles, and CTR is an incredibly important metric for getting the content served by the algorithm.

And it isn't entirely true that including a face mugging for the camera is always the most visually engaging (although representations of people are very attention grabbing). A person in the image is a character for a story, the whole "worth a thousand words" is true in that a whole narrative can be compressed into a single image and viewed with a glance. A person or other sentient being is a character for that story (I'm sure cat thumbnails do well too).

Just try to think of an interesting narrative involving exclusively inanimate objects. Kinda hard; the whole "animate" thing seems to be necessary to give a before, middle, and after to events (ok, maybe collisions, explosives, and rockets might work, they'd probably do well as thumbnails too). A thumb with Linus looking surprised or disappointed or puzzled gives a short and incomplete narrative about the object he is looking at and how it made him feel those emotions. Part of this is that watching the video will give you a more complete narrative.

"Please take a moment to subscribe" and "smash that bell icon" are the video version of "Subscribe to my crappy newsletter" popups. And before that, in the world of print magazines, it was multiple subscription cards that fell into your lap -- even if you were already a subscriber. The reason is an unsatisfying one: They work, and it's difficult to measure penalty metrics that show they're causing more harm than good.

I would think a human face would be the most effective thumbnail, and that there are psychological reasons for this. When I worked in print magazines, there were metrics thrown around a lot for how well cover subjects did in terms of newsstand copies sold: Animals > inanimate objects; Humans > animals; color > b&w; photos > illustrations; eye contact with the camera > looking away; females > males.

Apps are also getting into the fun, and tons are now including screaming faces[1] as their icon, no matter how related to the gameplay. Can't wait for a productivity app trying to pull off this icon...

[1] https://i.redd.it/2t190ls2j2571.png

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