When YouTube thumbnails feature certain facial expressions such as surprise or disgust, do those videos tend to get more views?
To find out, researchers at Kapwing used the AI facial recognition tool Amazon Rekognition to analyze the faces in the thumbnails of the most popular YouTubers across ten categories.
An infographic (below) covers key findings from the research.
It looks at which facial expressions are correlated with the most YouTube views, the facial expressions used most often by top YouTubers in their thumbnails, and the most popular facial expressions across various categories.
Check out the infographic:
