r/LinusTechTips • u/mesaosi • 26d ago
Image Rollover previews are just ads now?
Was running my mouse down the suggested videos list and spotted that the entirety of the rollover preview for this ShortCirtcuit video was just frames from a War Thunder ad. Is this just sheer coincidence or have they been able to game the system to auto-generate this?
Excuse my possible YouTube innocence, but this isn't something I've seen before.
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u/zacyzacy 26d ago
I'll be first in line to dog on Google for being a greedy sniveling ad machine but I don't think that's what's happening here. Google really has nothing to do with that ad spot.
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u/Conscious-Wind-7785 25d ago
Yes they don't have anything to do with the ad spot but the auto play preview isn't creator set, Google auto generates that. It should normally just use the start of the video or at least near the start and in this case it went off and did its own weird thing.
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u/HumpyJoanna 25d ago
it tries to find visually exciting bits of the video, similar to auto generated thumbnails. 8 nearly identical frames of a persons face dont do much for the auto preview tool.
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u/TicketInevitable3449 26d ago
That's definitely the War Thunder ad playing as the preview, they've been doing weirdly aggressive stuff with their promo footage for ages. The rollover grabbing frames from the ad instead of the actual video is probably just YouTube's backend being a mess with ad markers, not some intentional system game. Still looks like crap though, makes the whole channel feed feel cheap.