Comment by kmoser
7 hours ago
> This is something I find fascinating about TikTok: on that platform you literally get a few seconds to catch the attention of your audience before they skip to the next video.
Before TikTok, the YouTube "hook" was to choose the right image thumbnail that would entice people to click on your video. There was a time when YouTube didn't let you select a thumbnail; they would automatically select an image from a certain time in the video, so producers adapted by filming their videos so the most visually engaging moment came at that time.
Fifteen years ago, I ran a YouTube channel with hundreds of obscure French videos about pediatrics and parenting. One of them suddenly attracted massive attention worldwide, especially from Pakistan and Indonesia. According to the stats, 99% of the viewers were male. Millions and millions of views. For months, it sat in the top five French videos on YouTube. Ad revenue went through the roof, like three figures per day, for months, from that single video. None of the others on the channel saw anything remotely similar. It was baffling.
Then I understood why. The automatic thumbnail generator had picked a frame from the exact middle of the two-minute video. It showed a close-up of a newborn heel prick test: a nurse firmly holding the baby’s heel and pricking it to collect a drop of blood for routine postnatal genetic screening. The thumbnail frame looked like a skin-colored cylinder grasped by a woman’s hand.
Thankfully, the flood of comments, expressing disgust and horror at a medical procedure on a newborn after viewers had expected something entirely different, did not prevent the algorithm from enthusiastically recommending that thumbnail to a significant fraction of humanity.