A Netflix user will browse the app for 90 seconds and leave if they find nothing.
Thumbnail artwork is actually NFLX's most effective lever to influence a viewer's choice. A user will look at one for only 1.8 seconds, so NFLX spends huge to optimize them.
Here's a breakdown🧵
1/ Spoiler alert: humans are visual animals.
Our eyes move 3-4x per second to process information and we can analyze an image in as little as 13 milliseconds.
2/ In 2014, Netflix consumer research showed that thumbnail artwork:
◻️ is "the biggest influencer...to watch content"
◻️ is the focus of 82% of browsing time
A user looks at one for only 1.8 seconds. If they can't find Netflix content in 90 seconds, they'll leave the app.
3/ Consequently, Netflix uses an elaborate thumbnail selection process for each of its 200m+ users.
The process is called aestethic visual analysis (AVA), which starts by pulling all the frames from a video.
For reference: a 1hr episode of "Stranger Things" has 86k frames.
4/ In a process known as "Frame Annotation", each frame is tagged with metadata identifying key variables:
◻️ Saliency
◻️ Frame #
◻️ Brightness / Contrast
◻️ Nudity probability
◻️ Face / skin tone