Video marketing can be an extremely effective way to reach your target audience quickly. There are some distinct advantages to using video in your marketing efforts, due to some of the unique aspects of video as compared to written content.

If you have already produced some videos of your own and submitted them to sites such as YouTube, Google Video, Viddler or one of the countless other sites, you have likely been less than thrilled with the image those sites chose from your video to display to potential viewers.

It takes courage to shoot some video of yourself and post it publically for all the world to see. It certainly doesn't help when the video site chooses a still shot of you looking like a cross between Cheech Marin and Quasimodo.

Not a pretty picture

I decided early on I'd like to have a little more control over the thumbnail being used for my video. The question was, how did these sites decide what frame was going to be used as a thumbnail?

I initially thought there might be some face recognition software used which actually sought out the ugliest possible still shot of me. Either that, or the thumbnail was actually chosen manually by staff members who used to work for the DMV. It turns out, neither is the case. Each site has their own method of choosing the thumbnail, whether it be a time algorithm based on the total length of the video, taking the first frame, or something else. I decided I wanted to systematically find out how each site chose the thumbnail.

So, I recorded a couple different versions of a very simple clockvideo. I then uploaded that video to many differenct sites to seewhat frames were chosen for the thumbnail. This seemingly simple task hasyielded some interesting, and sometimes frustrating results. Below is a list of the video sites, and what I found for the thumbnails on eachone:

YouTube

I initially thought this was going to be one of the most straightforward sites. I had already read that YouTube chooses three thumbnails for each video and uses a simple mathematical formula to do so.

• 1st Thumbnail - Take total video time and divide that number by four. For example, a 6 minute video would produce the first thumbnail at 1.5 minutes into the video, and a 9 minute video would have a thumbnail at 2.25 minutes.
• 2nd Thumbnail (default)- Total video time divided by two. Basically, the default thumbnail should be located exactly halfwayh through your video
• 3rd Thumbnail - No surprise here. Take the total time and multiply it by .75, so your thumbnail for a 6 minute video would be at 4.5 minutes, and a 9 minute video would be 6.75 minutes.

This worked for two test videos I submitted perfectly, but when I uploaded the videos using TubeMogul, I got conflicting results. The thumbnails weren't quite matching the times, though they were close. See the video above as an example. Also, when looking at another of my videos, I noticed the thumbnail chosen for my own viewing didn't match ANY of the three choices I was given to present to my audience. Further investigation is necessary, and the results will be posted here soon.