YouTube has at last added thumbnail previews on its desktop platform. Users of the popular online streaming media can now hover their mouse on any video thumbnail on the website to get a 3 second preview of the clip contents. Actually, this is still limited to certain browsers – Chrome and Opera and it’s not yet available for mobile users.
The absence of thumbnail previews made it challenging to glance through the content of the video without clicking it, yet some video sites have been making use of this technology for years now. Some content creators have been taking advantage of this YouTube weakness to exaggerate or over-hyped their videos with unrelated thumbnail images, thus attracting viewers to clicking on it.
Now, with the thumbnail preview users can quickly scan through the video to see if it is what they are actually looking for before clicking.
Regrettably, this perhaps won't stop the clickbaiters for long. Checking the last line in YouTube's support post, it states: "Currently, creators are not able to select the preview that is shown." The "currently" part simply means, content creators might eventually allowed by YouTube to set their own previews for thumbnails later on.
With that, we will soon be seeing corners cutters.
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