
The Power Of A Picture - Vagantem
https://media.netflix.com/en/company-blog/the-power-of-a-picture
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rdancer
I have just enough experience with marketing to be able to avoid images that
are shit. All their loser images are shit. The author of the article is on the
right path, faces full of emotions and cultural relatability is important. The
best teasers (and snapshots are just the most minimalist teasers) make a
promise to (1) tell a story that is (2) relevant to me and (3) fits my mood.

The problem with video snapshots is that everybody is so freaking good. We're
spoiled by every random tube site doing image recognition and automatically
A/B testing frames from videos and serving the most popular. Big budgets are
spent on promoting movies and TV. So a lay analysis like this cannot possibly
begin to scratch the surface.

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Gaelan
I'm confused as to why Netflix would need to A/B test their thumbnails. If
people are browsing thumbnails, I think they would already be paying
subscribers. Is there a business reason for doing this?

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Alphasite_
Help customers find content they like and keep them around. If you run out of
content, why wouldn't you cancel your subscription?

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mark_l_watson
Nice! A/B testing carried to its logical conclusion. I would not have thought
of dynamically rating thumbnail images, but once I read the article, it was
'of course' they would do that.

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nihonde
Netflix: 2016 and we still don't let you sort by rating or filter out media
you've already seen.

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justinsaccount
Sorting by rating can be subjective, but it is odd that it doesn't hide things
you've already seen.

There's even a 'Watch it again' category that is populated by things that you
watched and rated highly.

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nihonde
There's nothing subjective about withholding the ability to sort/filter by
ratings.

And it's obvious that users should be able to mark content as "watched" even
if you didn't watch it on Netflix.

I generally like Netflix, but when I'm wading through 100s of movies and
television programs that I've already seen, or that have 1 or 2 stars, my
loyalty to Netflix is greatly diminished.

Meanwhile, they waste time and money on algorithmic recommendations that are,
in my experience, almost completely useless. (And I've bothered to rate a lot
of content in the hope of improving their recommendations, too.)

I want to turn on Netflix (or an alternative), hide all the watched content,
hide everything below three stars, sort by highest-to-lowest rating. It's not
difficult.

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pmlnr
So the "don't judge a book by it's cover" doesn't reach enough people these
days.

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mixedCase
Did it ever?

