We all know how important the thumbnail of a video can be. Learning how to create video thumbnails is vital in getting more clicks, which is step one in getting people to watch your video.
We all want to get more clicks, exactly like Netflix.
A Netflix user will browse the app for 90 seconds and leave if they find nothing.
The thumbnail of a show is one of the biggest levers Netflix has to influence the choice of its customers. (The same goes for YouTube creators.)
And the last thing Netflix wants if for people to leave their platform.
So we penned a short article on how Netflix creates their thumbnails.
Let’s dig in.
Netflix uses an elaborate thumbnail selection process for each of its 200 million-plus users
This means different users will see different thumbnails for the same movie.
This is how the process works:
1) Each movie has tens of thousands of frames
For reference, a one-hour episode of “Stranger Things” has 86k frames.
In a process known as Frame Annotation, they attribute a tag to each frame to identify key variables:
– Saliency
– The number of the frame
– Brightness and contrast.
– Nudity probability
– Face or skin tone
2) The system chooses a thumbnail based on
– Visual elements: brightness, contrast, color, motion blur
– Contextual: face detection and shot angle
– Composition: photography principles like “rule of thirds,” symmetry, depth of field
– Expressive faces
– Main characters
– Brightness
Other lessons
– Netflix uses different thumbnails for each country.
They pick the one that appeals the most to a specific region.
– Thumbnails showing villains characters get clicked more.
– Thumbnails showing more than three people vastly underperform.
– Machine Learning selects a thumbnail for you based on recent watch history.
If you watch romantic movies, Netflix will show you a romantic frame from a show.
– Netflix shows trending actors for shows they played a smaller role.
For instance, they’ll show Anya Taylor-Joy, who is the main star of The Queen Gambit, in a Peaky Blinders’ thumbnail, where she played a limited role.
Whether you prefer The Queen’s Gambit or Peaky Blinders, Netflix can definitely help you make thumbnails with a higher CTR.
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