There's a bit of history embedded into today's Vlogbrothers video, an almost blink and you'll miss it "easter egg" if you will. And no, it's not about facts about giraffes. Although, it may still have a little something to do with giraffes. However, if you know anything about YouTube thumbnails, you may already have an idea of where I'm going with this.
Welcome back to Vlogbrothers Rewatch -- an ongoing series of short articles in which I document my journey through -- yep, you guessed it -- rewatching every Vlogbrothers video included on their YouTube channel. Using this playlist, I am going through one video per day, in chronological order, starting from the very beginning (that's January 1, 2007 -- a long time ago, in a YouTube very different from the one we know today).
One of the many ways YouTube has changed drastically since 2007 is not only the significance of thumbnails, but how thumbnails are selected. Not everyone had the capacity to create and upload custom thumbnails in the beginning. For a long time, YouTube simply chose a thumbnail automatically at the exact middle point of the video.
And that is why the thumbnail for the video I'm discussing right now looks like this. Because 2007 Hank Green knew this about thumbnails, and just happened to hold up a particular photo at the exact middle point of his video, which now has over a million views -- much higher than the average Vlogbrothers video view count on average.
This is, of course, no longer how it works. YouTube will still automatically make the middle of your video the thumbnail unless you tell it otherwise, but many creators opt to upload custom thumbnails because the algorithm supposedly likes those better. I suppose some things, in retrospect, never really change.