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AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by

AI thumbnails outperform human thumbnails on YouTube by a lot, I've seen click-through rate spreads of 4%+ (~5% -> ~9% in AB tests). Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous.

driverdan 18d ago
Do those rates hold across multiple videos over a period of time? I've seen at least one case where someone did an A/B test of an AI thumbnail and the reason his engagement went up because everyone hated it and was commenting to say as much.
Kubuxu 18d ago
Novelty is a significant driving factor here. Gen Thumbnails are eye catching because they are new and viewers haven’t adapted to skimming over them like they do with everything else. Thumbnails, same as everything that is supposed to attract attention, have styles that change over time due to saturation and fatigue.
- Forgeties79 17d ago
  It’s the current iteration of the red arrow with a (staged) surprised face and as you’re saying we will all learn to just skip it as well. These things are always an arms race, and given LLM’s can only generate facsimiles of things I don’t see how it can stay ahead of it
ks2048 18d ago
What's ridiculous about that?
dspillett 18d ago
A lot of any real gain will be due to novelty, and that will wane once you've been doing it a short time (or once other people in your field are doing it so you all go back to looking the same). I suspect a lot of the gain isn't even that useful to the channel: it being people clicking to complain. You might not see that mean actual complaints because many will see the existing ones and either just upvote them or move on without doing anything (their chance to repeat their regular comment to get a few upvotes having been taken by someone already having said it).
- phoghed 17d ago
  So you’re saying it boosts engagement, advancing the creators primary goal of putting something on YouTube to begin with?
  - whattheheckheck 17d ago
    Shitty engagement that's not good long term human flourishing.
    - phoghed 17d ago
      Shitty engagement will just get them recommended to more people because of The Algorithm though.
      - zahlman 17d ago
        Yes, and this is a bad thing. It's bad that it gets rewarded and it's bad that creators whose main content is good feel compelled to do it. And I would watch all of this stuff just the same, based on the topic matter and the channel's reputation, without them doing these things, as long as YouTube had put a trial of that content in front of me in the first place. And I get no way to actually give that feedback on YouTube. There are plenty of channels I'll watch semi-regularly that have god-awful thumbnails. But the same is true of almost everything that I immediately click "don't recommend channel" on.
  - dspillett 17d ago
    I'm saying that it at best drives a temporary increase in engagement, then you look even more like everyone else than you did before because everyone is doing the same thing with the same AIs. And while that engagement counts in the immediate stats, it might result in a drop overall as some mark you as a channel they don't want to visit again. Then again, I don't think many youtubers are relying on discerning viewers so maybe they will get a boost in the hollow attention the crave.
    - 17d ago
ks2048 18d ago
"Since I've added gambling and pornography to my old niche hobby website, my profits are up 4% - how can anyone criticize me?" Not a perfect analogy, but adding some bait that does indeed work for grabbing attention can of course be criticized.
- daveidol 17d ago
  And of course those criticisms can and should be dismissed if the creators goals are purely to maximize engagement
  - boelboel 17d ago
    You can dismiss criticisms of theft if you look at the goals of the thiefs
  - catlifeonmars 17d ago
    No that _is_ the criticism
  - wat10000 17d ago
    The goal of purely maximizing engagement should itself be dismissed.
  - Forgeties79 17d ago
    Lying, grifting, and promoting conspiracies online also maximizes engagement and drives revenue. I guess we should go ahead and do that too. This whole conversation makes me want to throw up
    - johnnyanmac 17d ago
      This does make me wonder if I'm being disillusioned or if the community has genuinely shifted in the past 2–3 years or so. Or of this merely a greater societal shift as "history culture" takes off. You'd think sentiments like "clickbait is bad" would be a common sentiment here, but now I'm not so sure anymore.
sfn42 17d ago
I watch a lot og gaming videos on youtube, often of new indie games to see if I want to play them. Some creators will use AI-generated thumbnails that look nothing like the actual game, and before I recognize them and ignore that creator, they'll get clickthroughs. And then I'll see that I was bamboozled and exit the video. I don't care if someone uses AI to "style" their thumbnails, but if you use it to completely misrepresent what the video is about I'll leave in protest. That has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with the fact that it's clickbait. I don't like human-generated clickbait either.
margorczynski 17d ago
> Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous. That's just a loud minority. Most people really don't care about using AI in what you do as long as it is entertaining. The real world ain't Reddit.
fallingbananna 17d ago
Maybe. I don't think clickrate on Youtube is a meaningful metric if all you want is for the right people to show up at your event.
JDups 17d ago
Maximizing click-through rates leads to garbage clickbait and often misleading thumbnails, it is not a good metric. Those kinds of thumbnail, and channels built on low effort but high engagement content, were widely derided before AI came along.
- deleted 17d ago
  [deleted]
justhw 17d ago
[dead]
zahlman 17d ago
There are channels I watch regularly because they cover topics I want to see covered and I've seen their previous videos and they met my expectations. Then they'll use AI thumbnails while focused on finding the right topics and thinking about how to present them. Some of them are clearly letting an AI write the main part of a script and reading it off (while still being clearly a human doing this and not some weird TTS monstrosity). It annoys me to think that I'm incentivizing people to do this, or letting The Algorithm get the wrong idea about the quality of these shitty thumbnails that don't matter now that the creator is in my feed and I can read the video titles. (I also end up watching a fair bit of stuff where the thumbnail is literally just a random frame from the video, which lets me know the subject, and the title is some clickbait nonsense that I don't care about. There are a lot of ways for this stuff to work.)
poulpy123 16d ago
I hate clickbait titles but I still click on them too often. The fact they work well to grab my attention doesn't mean I like them, and it's probably the same here.

driverdan 18d ago

Do those rates hold across multiple videos over a period of time? I've seen at least one case where someone did an A/B test of an AI thumbnail and the reason his engagement went up because everyone hated it and was commenting to say as much.

Kubuxu 18d ago

Novelty is a significant driving factor here. Gen Thumbnails are eye catching because they are new and viewers haven’t adapted to skimming over them like they do with everything else. Thumbnails, same as everything that is supposed to attract attention, have styles that change over time due to saturation and fatigue.

Forgeties79 17d ago
It’s the current iteration of the red arrow with a (staged) surprised face and as you’re saying we will all learn to just skip it as well. These things are always an arms race, and given LLM’s can only generate facsimiles of things I don’t see how it can stay ahead of it

ks2048 18d ago

What's ridiculous about that?

dspillett 18d ago

A lot of any real gain will be due to novelty, and that will wane once you've been doing it a short time (or once other people in your field are doing it so you all go back to looking the same). I suspect a lot of the gain isn't even that useful to the channel: it being people clicking to complain. You might not see that mean actual complaints because many will see the existing ones and either just upvote them or move on without doing anything (their chance to repeat their regular comment to get a few upvotes having been taken by someone already having said it).

phoghed 17d ago
So you’re saying it boosts engagement, advancing the creators primary goal of putting something on YouTube to begin with?
- whattheheckheck 17d ago
  Shitty engagement that's not good long term human flourishing.
  - phoghed 17d ago
    Shitty engagement will just get them recommended to more people because of The Algorithm though.
    - zahlman 17d ago
      Yes, and this is a bad thing. It's bad that it gets rewarded and it's bad that creators whose main content is good feel compelled to do it. And I would watch all of this stuff just the same, based on the topic matter and the channel's reputation, without them doing these things, as long as YouTube had put a trial of that content in front of me in the first place. And I get no way to actually give that feedback on YouTube. There are plenty of channels I'll watch semi-regularly that have god-awful thumbnails. But the same is true of almost everything that I immediately click "don't recommend channel" on.
- dspillett 17d ago
  I'm saying that it at best drives a temporary increase in engagement, then you look even more like everyone else than you did before because everyone is doing the same thing with the same AIs. And while that engagement counts in the immediate stats, it might result in a drop overall as some mark you as a channel they don't want to visit again. Then again, I don't think many youtubers are relying on discerning viewers so maybe they will get a boost in the hollow attention the crave.
  - 17d ago

ks2048 18d ago

"Since I've added gambling and pornography to my old niche hobby website, my profits are up 4% - how can anyone criticize me?" Not a perfect analogy, but adding some bait that does indeed work for grabbing attention can of course be criticized.

daveidol 17d ago
And of course those criticisms can and should be dismissed if the creators goals are purely to maximize engagement
- boelboel 17d ago
  You can dismiss criticisms of theft if you look at the goals of the thiefs
- catlifeonmars 17d ago
  No that _is_ the criticism
- wat10000 17d ago
  The goal of purely maximizing engagement should itself be dismissed.
- Forgeties79 17d ago
  Lying, grifting, and promoting conspiracies online also maximizes engagement and drives revenue. I guess we should go ahead and do that too. This whole conversation makes me want to throw up
  - johnnyanmac 17d ago
    This does make me wonder if I'm being disillusioned or if the community has genuinely shifted in the past 2–3 years or so. Or of this merely a greater societal shift as "history culture" takes off. You'd think sentiments like "clickbait is bad" would be a common sentiment here, but now I'm not so sure anymore.

sfn42 17d ago

I watch a lot og gaming videos on youtube, often of new indie games to see if I want to play them. Some creators will use AI-generated thumbnails that look nothing like the actual game, and before I recognize them and ignore that creator, they'll get clickthroughs. And then I'll see that I was bamboozled and exit the video. I don't care if someone uses AI to "style" their thumbnails, but if you use it to completely misrepresent what the video is about I'll leave in protest. That has nothing to do with AI, and everything to do with the fact that it's clickbait. I don't like human-generated clickbait either.

margorczynski 17d ago

> Yet people will do drive by comments trying to excoriate creators for using AI thumbnails. It's really quite ridiculous. That's just a loud minority. Most people really don't care about using AI in what you do as long as it is entertaining. The real world ain't Reddit.

fallingbananna 17d ago

Maybe. I don't think clickrate on Youtube is a meaningful metric if all you want is for the right people to show up at your event.

JDups 17d ago

Maximizing click-through rates leads to garbage clickbait and often misleading thumbnails, it is not a good metric. Those kinds of thumbnail, and channels built on low effort but high engagement content, were widely derided before AI came along.

deleted 17d ago
[deleted]

justhw 17d ago

[dead]

zahlman 17d ago

There are channels I watch regularly because they cover topics I want to see covered and I've seen their previous videos and they met my expectations. Then they'll use AI thumbnails while focused on finding the right topics and thinking about how to present them. Some of them are clearly letting an AI write the main part of a script and reading it off (while still being clearly a human doing this and not some weird TTS monstrosity). It annoys me to think that I'm incentivizing people to do this, or letting The Algorithm get the wrong idea about the quality of these shitty thumbnails that don't matter now that the creator is in my feed and I can read the video titles. (I also end up watching a fair bit of stuff where the thumbnail is literally just a random frame from the video, which lets me know the subject, and the title is some clickbait nonsense that I don't care about. There are a lot of ways for this stuff to work.)

poulpy123 16d ago

I hate clickbait titles but I still click on them too often. The fact they work well to grab my attention doesn't mean I like them, and it's probably the same here.