The power of thumbnail images combined with big data profiling
Lately I was attending a webinar about data science and they explained about Netflix as a data-driven company. Netflix uses big data to decide which contents are interesting, which movie director to choose even the timing of distribution. They knew that people wait until a full season is available to watch more episodes at once.
“The thumbnails are always changing on Netflix because you’re being tested” The Verge.
What I didn’t know is that the thumbnails of the content are different depending on the user profile. It’s not A/B testing, Netflix has a catalogue of images to show depending on the user profile.
As The Verge writes, the artwork on its content has the biggest influence on what people choose to watch — capturing “82 percent of their focus while browsing Netflix.” Well, yeah, that seems obvious; Netflix is a giant carousel of image thumbnails! But Netflix writes that the window for getting someone’s attention is pretty short: users spend an average of just under 2 seconds looking at each show or film they come across.
See this example of Strange things. It’s the same content, but every Thumbnails has a different mood, tells a different story.
- 1) “Horror movie in the forest”
- 2) “Friends from the 80s on the road vs creepy storm”
- 4) “Psycho-drama in the school with 80s haircut”
Netflix knows how to engage the audiences. They show emotional faces showing emotions like surprise, mistery. Or they show danger, mistery situations.
The question is which audience will be more engaged with the image. If the viewer profile is more interested in stories about relationships they will show number 8. If the viewer is more interested in horror movies they will go for number 1 or number 7/9.
When they create thumbnails they follow this strategies to get more emotional impact on their images:
- Show close-ups of emotionally expressive faces
- Show people villains instead of heroes
- Don’t show more than three characters
I took a look at the thumbnails of Star Wars’ The Mandalorian and the Thumbnails they use within Disney+ platform. Images don’t change and they display the main character which has a mask and no emotional expression at all.
