YouTube introduces thumbnail previews for videos

YouTube has at lastly 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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