YouTube is experimenting with automatic thumbnail generation

YouTube is testing a display of automatically generated thumbnails for a small part of its users. Some users complain about it because they spend a lot of time creating eye-catching thumbnails.

Google gives against a user who asks where their own thumbnails have gone to conduct an experiment in which 0.3 percent of viewers see automatically generated images. The company wants to gain insights for the future, but emphasizes that it does not remove the option to create the small images yourself.

YouTube wants to use the test, among other things, to make better automated thumbnails and it also wants to investigate its effectiveness. According to the video service, it would be a frequently requested function. The Verge cites some comments from users who aren’t happy with the feature and the way YouTube tests it without clearly communicating it.

Many users who publish videos on YouTube spend a relatively large amount of time creating the thumbnails. They are afraid that the automatic creation will lose context, fewer people click and misrepresentation. Thumbnail display can have a major impact on channel popularity, Motherboard wrote in a background on the phenomenon last year.