Every day YouTube is finding ways to “help” it’s creators make outstanding video. Its more recent ideas is to create a system, an Auto Generated Thumbnail system, which allows YouTube to create a thumbnail automatically based on your videos. Yeah….I don’t know about you but this doesn’t sound all too great of an idea.
I’ll always say this, I will always be an advocate for change and improvement in technology but as a content creator, I can’t help but instantly feel negatively towards any changes that YouTube has or will make in the future. YouTube never listens to its creator as they’ve claimed in the past so it makes it difficult to support them.
Now YouTube has decided that it has another ingenious idea of creating the thumbnails for the creators.
 Well to be more precise, it’s in an early stage of testing and is being tested on 3% of YouTubers right now but it’s still wild to me that they want to take away yet another creativity outlet that lets us express ourselves.
The only plus side to all of this is the fact that clickbait thumbnails would be tackled head-on. That would be dope to see the end of the clickbait era for good. Now, we still don’t know whether this new feature will be enforced in the future or not but if it is then that would be… interesting to say the least.
It’s becoming more and more difficult to adapt to YouTube ever changing system and the worst part of it all is that there isn’t another platform that could rival the giant. It’s able to make all of these changes BECAUSE there’s not risk involved. They know most people can’t go anywhere because all eyes are on them. If you want to grow, if you want that reach, it’s on YouTube.
Anyways, I just wanted to express my thoughts on the subject. Let me know what you guys think of it all.
We are running a small experiment where 0.3% of viewers will see an auto-generated thumbnail, instead of your custom thumbnail. We are not removing the ability to create your custom thumbnail, but we hope to gain insights on auto-generated thumbnails for the future.
— TeamYouTube (@TeamYouTube) June 28, 2018