Who wants to be a Click-Millionaire? On the Influence of Thumbnails and Captions

How to be successful on a video platform with 720K hours of video uploaded daily? This is the key question for every Youtube content creator. Especially, because there is only a thumbnail image and a short caption to attract the users’ attention and convince them to click a video. We introduce the Youtube-Science-Channels dataset containing more than 19k Youtube thumbnails and captions along with meta attributes, such as likes, dislikes and views from 40 channels. A Youtube video’s success is defined as generating lots of views. Given this labeling, a computational model is built in order to predict the success of a video using solely its thumbnail and caption. Experimental results are presented on both, the individual videos as well as aggregated per Youtube channel. Our combined vision and natural language model can accurately predict success. In addition, we analyse the effect of using clickbait in video captions. We show that clickbait is positively correlated with a Youtube channel’s success but that other factors such as high quality animations are important as well.