AI is the death knell for thumbnail designers
AI is the death knell for thumbnail designers
The thumbnail, that small image that accompanies videos on YouTube, has created an entire industry of designers and developers whose job it is to attract clicks. Now, artificial intelligence is endangering those whose entire work was focused on one tiny image
Have you ever paid attention to the small picture that is chosen to accompany videos on YouTube? The picture, called a thumbnail, used to be an automatic product, a single frame from the video that was extracted under a certain algorithmic logic. Today it is the basis for an entire industry of research, hypotheses and developments, that is until generative artificial intelligence came along.
While browsing, users look at the thumbnail, and if it's a good one, it increases the attractiveness of the video and weighs in the decision whether to click on it. Clicks are the holy grail of creators that translate them not only to social capital, but also and perhaps mainly to revenue from ads. Thumbnails are a business.
In principle, YouTube's parent company, Alphabet, does not share how many videos exist on its platform or their average length. A recently published study from the University of Massachusetts estimated that there are no less than 14 billion videos on YouTube - a video and a half for every person on the planet. They also found that a fraction of all videos are responsible for most of the site's traffic: videos with 10,000 or more views make up almost 94% of the total traffic, but they make up less than 4% of the videos that exist on the platform. About 5% of the videos have no views at all, almost three quarters have no comments, and even more of them have no likes.
1. A visual style that has become legendary
Therefore, it is a particularly crowded space for capturing attention, but the creators themselves have very few tools to gain an advantage in this competition. The main means is the thumbnail, a tiny photo. Although these images themselves do not generate much discussion, and their existence almost disappears into the background, for over a decade they have been the focus of research and great interest among content creators, developers and academia. They recognize the power of the thumbnail to significantly improve video performance.
The rules that have formed around the thumbnail are quite simplistic. Because YouTube search is visual as much as it is textual, the single image should not only represent or include the appropriate images for the searching user, but also be aesthetic and of high quality. At the same time the chosen visual theme should capture the idea behind the video, if it is wrong and not relevant to the search it may lead to negative criticism and in the end also harm the ranking and visibility of the creator by the YouTube algorithm.
It can be assumed that Google did not imagine that a niche thumbnail economy would develop from this tiny preview. But it soon became clear that the existing automatic product did not respond well to human aesthetic perception, and flesh and blood designers were recruited to the task of summarizing video content in a compact and efficient manner, with the products today varying between a variety of criteria such as specific genre, local taste, the tone of the video and the means of viewing - whether it be computer, phone or smart TV.
These designers are known as "Thumbnail designers", a profession that flourishes on freelancer platforms like Fiverr, but their presence is especially noticeable on employment platforms for jobs specifically related to the YouTube economy (known as YT Jobs). These sites concentrate jobs such as video editors, producers, screenwriters and channel managers, with thumbnail designers starring as one of the most sought-after jobs. Those involved in the craft offer anyone who wants one photo for one video for amounts ranging from $5 to several thousand dollars, depending on the level of professionalism, sophistication and the client. The creator MrBeast, who has the largest number of subscribers in the world on YouTube (237 million), previously explained that he pays about $10,000 for one thumbnail. Mr. Beast is a particularly good example, because the visual style he developed for himself in thumbnails has become truly legendary in certain circles, with many still following him today.
The level of skill, the depth of detail and the decisions he makes regarding his thumbnail images are all a source of discussion in themselves. For example, about a year ago he published that a thumbnail in which his mouth is closed attracts more views than one in which his mouth is open - an insight that was covered in the media. Mr. Beast concluded 2022 with revenues of $82 million.
2. Will anyone miss YouTube designers?
The thumbnail economy is now facing its biggest challenge - generative artificial intelligence. Such tools allow not only designers, but the creators themselves to formulate the desired visual expression for themselves with very little effort or skill using a text-to-image generator such as DALL·E 2 or Midjourney. In the past year, several dedicated thumbnail design tools like CTRHero were released, and everyone knows how to copy or draw deep inspiration from existing and successful designs, such as the one developed by Mr. Beast. The thumbnail designers' place in this changing world is now endangered. Exactly the danger that analysts and technologists have talked about continuously in the last year, which concerns the elimination of jobs by the latest developments in the field of artificial intelligence.
It is hard to ignore that we have devoted many words to a YouTube thumbnail, and the niche economy that has developed around it. It may be that those who have read this far will also think to themselves that the elimination of such a job by artificial intelligence is not a bad thing at all. You would not be alone.
Back in 1928, the economist John Maynard Keynes estimated that in 100 years technological progress would be so great that we would work 15 hours a week. This did not happen. On the contrary, today people work more hours than ever before. How? According to the late anthropologist David Graeber, the capitalist system's thirst for capital for consumption has invented a new despicable phenomenon: "bullshit jobs," or "useless jobs that nobody wants to talk about." For example, a receptionist at a startup that has just started or a marketer at a company that does not yet have products.
Graeber came up with the idea, which immediately became very popular, over a decade ago. He referred to jobs that if they disappeared, no one would think too much about them, miss or cherish them; Although they are pointless and hard to justify, the workers in them pretend as if they are engaged in a significant enterprise of creating value. Graeber then argued that this purposeless work is not only wasteful but soul-destroying, since humans are social animals whose sense of self is linked, from a young age, to their sense of agency and ability to influence the world. The necessity to perform useless tasks just because it is their only means of survival, gnaws at their souls.
Graeber also estimated that robots will not eliminate these jobs, because robots need humans to break down complex tasks into simpler units that they know how to perform. But Graeber apparently didn't know the thumbnail designers, who devoted all their energy to leveraging their professional skill to produce one tiny image for a content creator.
