YouTube Thumbnails Video

YouTube Thumbnails Video - Testing the Process
YouTube has their own special way of choosing what still shots get selected to create video thumbnails. We tested lots of videos and came up with some interesting conclusions.

The old way of grabbing the thumbnail image from the 25%, 50% and 75% positions (based on length of a video) are no longer valid. That used to work prior to December 2008, so you'll still see some older videos around where it worked.

YouTube Thumbnails Video - Insert a Timer
In order to be accurate in how we located our thumbnail positions we had to employ a timer in the video. Watch the video and you will see it run. The timer has to be very accurate since you are wanting to let YouTube take a "snapshot" of the timer as it runs and then show you the number or position it settled on.

YouTube Thumbnails Video - Play By the Numbers

Then we took that number (position) and inserted a still image into the video in the exact spot (we actually straddled the exact position with 5 frames). So if the thumbnail position called for 1 second and 10 frames, we placed the desired still image at 1 second and 8 frames and let it run until 1 second and 12 frames.


YouTube Thumbnails Video - Carefully Insert Still Shots
You have to be careful that when you insert your still shots you don't add any length to the video as this will throw off the process by making a totally different video length. We used a technique to insert the image called "Cutaway". The Cutaway process cuts to a different image for the time we specify and keeps the overall length the same and also keeps the original video's audio uninterrupted. You can see another YouTube video using the inserted still shots by watching Video Thumbnail Trick.

YouTube Thumbnails Video - Timer Blues
By now you might be thinking "This is all well and good but when do we get rid of the timer?" Well, we also thought it might be that easy, but when we turned off the timer from playing during the movie, the positions YouTube choose changed drastically. So, for now, we are stuck with a timer running for a good part of the video.

YouTube Thumbnails Video - The Saga Continues

We will continue our research to see how to properly anticipate where to put still shots into a YouTube video to yield the expected thumbnail images without a timer but we thought we would share with you what we have come up with to date.

YouTube Thumbnails Video - The Primary goal of any company that provides Video SEO Services should be to help your videos drive traffic to your targeted web pages.

You can also view this video as:
YouTube Thumbnails Test 30 on YouTube

The ability to know thumbnail positions is not as difficult for some other hosting sites as demonstrated in the following articles: Video Thumbnail Metacafe & Video Thumbnail Viddler.

We also can accurately position thumbnails into MotionBox, MySpace and Yahoo videos as explained on our Video Thumbnail Services page.

YouTube Thumbnails Video - The Full Article

Click on the following link to read more about the process used with the YouTube Thumbnails Research project.