Give a Gist: The Impact of Thumbnails on the View-Through of Videos

Abstract

As more businesses become aware of the advantages of video marketing, the competition in online video platforms is becoming fierce. For video content, it is becoming more challenging to stand out from the crowd. Industry experts and anecdotal evidence have highlighted the importance of thumbnails for the view-through of videos. Thumbnails are usually the first thing that potential viewers see when they browse through an online video platform. While browsing through the platform, they decide which videos to click and watch based on the information and impression they obtain from thumbnails. Therefore, a thumbnail needs to be able to tell potential viewers what the video is about (i.e., be informative). At the same time, a thumbnail needs to grab potential viewers’ attention (i.e., be visually appealing). Drawing from the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), we take the visual attributes that are relevant to the informativeness of thumbnails (e.g., the element complexity and object complexity of thumbnails) as central route cues, take the visual attributes that are relevant to the aesthetics of thumbnails (e.g., the celebrity endorsement, colorfulness, brightness, and image quality of thumbnails) as peripheral route cues, and explore the relation between these visual attributes and the view-through of videos using 3,745 marketing videos posted by 38 top brands across 4 industries – the automobile, beverage, restaurant, and toy industries – on YouTube. We construct our variables by extracting features from thumbnails using image mining techniques. Thus, our measures are reasonably scalable and, more importantly, not subjective. This study contributes to the literature on information systems and marketing by enhancing our understanding of the role of visual attributes in persuading viewers in the context of video content marketing. Finally, our results provide useful guidelines for optimizing thumbnails to grab potential viewers’ attention and yield more video views.