The main reason for that appears to be a change to YouTube's user interface that has made the thumbnails for individual videos larger. These larger thumbnails are not popular with users.

Posting strange, questionably honest promotional thumbnails — the image previews you see before you start playing the video and the currency of YouTube’s promotional economy — isn’t aberr ...

YouTube has announced that it has been testing a new feature called "Test & Compare," the company's name for what is essentially a thumbnail A/B testing tool. YouTube's Test & Compare will let ...

Dill Toma, 19, has been making thumbnails for YouTube videos for six years. He graduated high school in 2021 and has been working full-time as a thumbnail designer since then. This is Toma's story ...

YouTube is testing a new desktop layout with much larger video thumbnails. Users report seeing as few as two videos per row, though it depends on screen and zoom settings. Frustrated users are ...

YouTube’s A / B thumbnail testing helped MrBeast find that a closed mouth led to longer watch times. YouTube’s A / B thumbnail testing helped MrBeast find that a closed mouth led to longer ...

When YouTube thumbnails feature certain facial expressions such as surprise or disgust, do those videos tend to get more views? To find out, researchers at Kapwing used the AI facial recognition tool ...