2 min
About new YouTube features
Yesterday YouTube announced several new features for creators. Two of them are pretty obvious and expected, but the third one raises questions.
- Dynamic thumbnails. Right now you can A/B test up to three thumbnails, and YouTube picks the one that performs best across your whole audience. With the update, YouTube will figure out the best thumbnail for each viewer segment (subscribers, new viewers) and show each group its own version.
I expect titles to get the same treatment eventually. You can already test them, but only paired with thumbnails.
- Thumbnails and titles generated right in Studio. AI will analyze your past videos and suggest options that match your channel’s style. How well this will work, especially in languages other than English, remains to be seen.
It’s a blow to the many services that sell this kind of “AI packaging” for videos. I’m afraid it will only make the average thumbnail look worse.
- And the most controversial one: A/B testing the video itself. You can upload three different versions of a video, and YouTube will test which one performs best. This immediately raises a lot of questions, and Marques Brownlee, for one, has pointed out several of them.
How different can the versions be? Completely different videos apparently won’t be allowed, but what counts as “completely different”? How will timestamps work across versions, especially in the comments? Will the comments be shared? What if people refer to parts that differ between versions? When you share a link, are you sharing a specific version? Or could your friend see a different one because of the test?
And beyond all these questions, I think this is another blow to indie creators. Making three thumbnails for a test is one thing (even that is expensive and hard for some), but three versions of a whole video? Where do you find the time and energy for that? The gap between big, well-funded creators and newcomers will only keep growing.