YouTube finally adds thumbnail previews for videos
YouTube has finally
added thumbnail previews on desktop. Users can now mouseover any video
thumbnail on the website and get a 3 second preview of the video contents. This
works on certain browsers only for now (Chrome and Opera) and is not available
yet on mobile.
The lack of thumbnail previews made it
difficult to gauge the content of the video without clicking it, even though
this technology has been available on some video sites for years now. This has
been taken advantage of by content creators by using "clickbait"
images for the thumbnails to entice viewers into clicking on their videos by
having an exaggerated or even unrelated image in the thumbnail. With previews
that now pull frames from random points in the video, users can see roughly
what they are getting into before clicking.
Unfortunately, this probably won't stop the
clickbaiters for long. As the last line in YouTube's support post says,
"Currently, creators are not able to select the preview that is
shown." The "currently" part states that YouTube might allow
content creators to set their own previews for thumbnails later on.
Can't wait to see that being abused, then.
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