Why YouTube Should Cut Off Its Thumbnails

YouTube, the internet’s primary video host for nearly two decades now, says it’s ready to start cracking down on “egregious clickbait,” with plans to “increase our enforcement against videos where the title or thumbnail promises viewers something that the video doesn’t deliver.” The company explains:

Egregious clickbait occurs when the video’s title or thumbnail includes promises or claims that aren’t delivered within the video itself, especially when that content focuses on breaking news or current events. This can leave viewers feeling tricked, frustrated, or even misled—particularly in moments when they come to YouTube in search for important or timely information.

People use the word clickbait to describe a lot of different things, so YouTube’s fairly clear and narrow definition here is useful for YouTubers who don’t want to get in trouble with the platform. This sort of stuff — blatantly misleading videos with newsy teasers that in some cases aren’t even videos at all — is all over the platform and pollutes searches and recommendations around breaking news events. Any new rules and enforcement actions understandably make YouTubers nervous, and the proximity of this action to controversial subjects and speech concerns means that the company has more than one reason to tread carefully. Still, a ban on egregious clickbait is sort of funny, like a law concerning very obvious crimes. It’s not quite an admission that routine clickbait is fine so much as a signal to YouTubers that they’re going after bad actors in clear-cut situations, and that as long as you’re not doing anything too scummy, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.

The problem is that manipulative scumminess is standard behavior on YouTube, not because of some universal defect in the deep and diverse range of people who publish on the platform, but because of the distribution systems and core incentives of the YouTube platform on which they work. Posting strange, questionably honest promotional thumbnails — the image previews you see before you start playing the video and the currency of YouTube’s promotional economy — isn’t aberrant YouTuber behavior, it’s industry best practice. It’s how you grow on a platform where luring new viewers and converting them into subscribers means standing out in YouTube’s various grids and lists of recommendations and suggested or related videos.

Overpromotion isn’t unique to YouTube — it’s been an inescapable part of the experience of consuming commercial mass media for as long as it’s existed. (How do you like that headline?) What’s unusual about YouTube’s situation is that it’s in a position to do something about it. It can do whatever it wants! It makes the rules, as exhibited above, but it also controls the primary distribution systems for YouTube videos: how they’re shown to people, how they’re promoted, and how they’re displayed and made. YouTube can keep making rules and modulating “enforcement” forever, feeding into its reputation among YouTubers as an opaque, capricious, and censorious pseudo-employer.

Or they could consider a more drastic action, one that would substantially solve the “egregious clickbait” problem and make YouTube a less aesthetically and psychologically hazardous environment in general: YouTube could ban custom thumbnails entirely.

I’m far from the first person to bring up the bizarre (and bizarrely uniform) state of YouTube’s thumbnail economy: For years, observers have noted the oppressive dominance of “YouTube face;” in 2017, Vice surveyed the “strange world” of YouTube thumbnails. Given the choice to promote their videos with any image they want, YouTube market forces and folk wisdom have led many popular YouTubers to adopt the same basic formats and styles: floating faces; messy collages; and subliterate splashes of text. Making thumbnails is a mandatory and miserable part of the job of being a YouTuber. As a result, making thumbnails for YouTubers has become an entirely separate job. YouTube has leaned into the importance of the thumbnail, providing guidance for YouTubers. If you’ve got 46 minutes of your one human life to spare, here’s a member of YouTube’s “growth and discovery team” talking with the guy who makes Mr. Beast’s thumbnails talking about strategies ($10,000 per thumbnail! 20 variations!) and algorithmic lore:

The thumbnail aesthetic is becoming increasingly uncanny and samey on a platform that is otherwise in the process of professionalizing and diversifying into a credible replacement for TV. Search for basically anything — even something as mild as criticism and discussion of a classic film — and you’ll get a wall of people making the same dopey expressions, superimposed in the same ways, all doing, to some extent, their best impression of Mr. Beast:

These aren’t “egregious” or fully misleading. But they’re produced by the same forces, and attempt to take advantage of the same opportunities that bad actors exploit. YouTube’s thumbnail economy makes everyone a little bit dishonest. Why not just get rid of the whole thing? If the image isn’t contained in the video, it can’t be the thumbnail. In users’ main feeds, videos already silently autoplay, sidelining the thumbnails in favor of something more useful. Why is the rest of the platform pumped with engagement-bait spam? Figure it out!

That YouTube could make a change like this is theoretically one of the benefits of a centralized — or, in political terms, totalitarian — platform. There are a few obvious reasons, from YouTube’s perspective, that it probably won’t. This thumbnail economy — contained within a severely overburdened feature added when nobody imagined YouTube would ever be this big — clearly helps produce a lot of engagement, and perhaps it’s in YouTube’s commercial interest to let it get as close to “egregious” as possible without becoming unusable. Like Amazon’s busy, ad-and-junk-filled interface, or Google’s trashed search results page, YouTube’s bizarre thumbnail ecosystem might be irreversibly understood internally as a load-bearing part of the business, and of what YouTube is: another top-down, managed marketplace that ends up looking and feeling like an unregulated free-for-all, minus the actual freedom. Still, it’s worth imagining if only to think clearly about why changes like this don’t happen — and it appears, years ago, that YouTube did that, too:

We are running a small experiment where 0.3% of viewers will see an auto-generated thumbnail, instead of your custom thumbnail. We are not removing the ability to create your custom thumbnail, but we hope to gain insights on auto-generated thumbnails for the future.

— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) June 28, 2018

A better platform is possible, and 0.3 percent of the YouTube user base might have experienced it for a brief fleeting moment in 2018. For now, YouTube says, assuming its trial in India goes well, we’ll have to settle for a ban on stuff like “a thumbnail that says ‘top political news’ on a video that doesn’t include any news coverage” and a “video title saying ‘the president resigned!’ where the video doesn’t address the president’s resignation.” It’s something!