WHOA: YouTube now lets you mouse over video thumbnails to watch a little preview of the video!!! this ruleshttps://t.co/gKdoQEtJzG
— Nick Robinson (@Babylonian) August 15, 2016
YouTube videos can sometimes be clickbait-y. This can either be done by having a very loud and enticing title, or it can sometimes contain a thumbnail that might make you want to click it. More often than not, these videos rarely deliver on what their titles or thumbnails would suggest, meaning that they are a big fat waste of time.
However it seems that YouTube could be testing out a new UI feature that will let users get an idea of what the video is about simply by hovering their mouse over the thumbnail. Basically when you hover your mouse over the thumbnail, the video (or at least parts of it) will start to play, so you roughly know what the rest of the video is like and whether or not it is in line with the title or thumbnail.
Like we said it appears to be in testing meaning that if you don’t see it, then you probably aren’t part of the test group. It is unclear as to how much control video creators will get over what gets played in the thumbnail, but we reckon it’s a bit too early to tell right now. In any case there’s also no guarantee that YouTube will take this feature live, but what do you guys think? Is this a feature you’d like to see on YouTube?
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