Thumbnails on YouTube Can Be a Dirty Business, Craig Reubens Says
Thumbnails on YouTube Can Be a Dirty Business, Craig Reubens Says
Oct 09, 2007
I caught up with NewTeeVee's Craig Reubens in New York recently at a party for his influential blog. In our interview, Craig unearths one of the dark secrets of online video marketing.Here's the scam: Since a thumbnail, the image from a video that appears on index and search pages can't be selected and inserted, some clever scammers have figured out how to insert an image into the point in the stream where it will be selected automatically by YouTube. Thumbnails are critical for the discovery of videos. We reported a few days ago on a relatively new development at YouTube where uploaders get a choice of three automatically selected thumbnails. We'll look forward to Craig's reports on this on NewTeeVee.Speaking of NewTeeVee, it is doing great. According to the latest Alexa numbers on reach, NewTeeVee is kicking the living borscht out of poor Beet.TV and leading handily over PodTech, that's if you believe the Alexa numbers, of course.-- Andy Plesser











yeah, no kidding. Look at creators such as No Good TV - mainly crap with sexy thumbnails.
It's been months since that changed, publishers can now chose their thumbnails between 3 or 4 different points in the video. Come on Craig, buddy.