Finally YouTube Adds Thumbnail Previews for Videos

Google has finally added thumbnail previews for YouTube videos on desktop. It's a much anticipated feature and now a timely update to make YouTube more interesting and addictive.

HOW IT WORKS

When you visit YouTube on desktop or lapto, you can now "mouseover" any video thumbnail on the website and get a 3 second preview of the video contents. The purpose of this is to let you know the content of the video even without clicking on it. For now, it works on Chrome and Opera only and is not available yet on mobile devices.

Before now, the lack of thumbnail previews made it difficult to know the content of the video without clicking it, even though this technology has been available on some video sites for years now.

DISADVANTAGES OF THIS FEATURE

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. This can be spotted on some Facebook videos with deceiving thumbnails that leads to unrelated sites when clicked upon. 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.
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