YouTube Thumbnail Study

Key takeaways

1. Of the 487 thumbnails on the latest regular uploads of 98 of the most-subscribed YouTube channels, 78% show a human face (32% one face, 46% two or more). Another 12% show only a cartoon, 3D or drawn character, and 9% show no face at all. See details
2. The faces are big: 68% of human faces fill at least a quarter of the thumbnail's height, and 54% have an open mouth (a shout, a grin or a gasp). See details
3. 45% of thumbnails carry headline text, and it's short: a median of 3 words, with 51% of them using three words or fewer. See details
4. 38% combine a face and headline text, and slightly more, 41%, use a face with no text. See details
5. About half of thumbnail text repeats the title: of 183 Latin-script thumbnails, 83 (45%) use only words from the title, while 100 (55%) add words of their own and 36 share none. See details
6. Kinds of channels differ: People channels put a human face on 100% of thumbnails, Education channels on 50%. See details
7. The popular claim that faces get 38% more clicks comes from a 2014 study of Instagram likes, not YouTube clicks; this study counts what big channels use, not what gets clicked. See details

How many YouTube thumbnails show a face?

Most do, on the biggest channels. We labelled the thumbnails of the latest regular uploads of 98 of the most-subscribed YouTube channels, 487 in all, and 382 (78%) showed at least one real human face. 157 (32%) showed one face, 111 two and 114 three or more, often a cast, a family or a team.

Drawn faces count too, if you include them: 100 thumbnails (21%) showed a cartoon, 3D-animated or drawn character, mostly on kids' and animation channels, and only 45 (9%) showed no face of any kind.

How big is the face, and is the mouth open?

Big. Of the 382 thumbnails with a human face, the largest face filled more than half the thumbnail's height on 49 and a quarter to half on 210, so 68% gave the face at least a quarter of the frame. 123 (32%) showed only small faces, typically a group shot or a scene where the face isn't the subject.

The "shocked face" is common but not universal: on 207 of 382 (54%) the largest face had its mouth open, shouting, gasping or grinning with teeth showing; the rest had a closed mouth or a closed-lip smile.

How many thumbnails have text, and how many words?

221 of 487 (45%) carried headline text, the words added to be read at a glance. We left out logos, small credit lines and badges such as "4K", which many thumbnails also carry. Where there was text it was short: a median of 3 words, and 112 of the 221 (51%) used three words or fewer. Long text mostly came from music labels and TV channels writing song, film or episode names, often in two scripts; 38 of the thumbnails with text (17%) used a non-Latin script such as Devanagari or Hangul.

Do big channels use a face and text together?

Less often than a face alone. 183 (38%) combined a human face with headline text, 199 (41%) used a face with no text, 38 (8%) text with no human face, and 67 (14%) neither, mostly animation and scene shots. 38 (8%) split the frame into a before-and-after or side-by-side, and 22 (5%) used a drawn arrow or circle.

Does the thumbnail text repeat the title?

About half the time. On the 183 thumbnails whose headline text is in the Latin alphabet, we compared it word by word with the video's title (ignoring "the", "a" and other filler words). 83 (45%) used only words that are also in the title. 64 (35%) mixed title words with new ones and 36 (20%) shared no words with the title at all.

Most of that repetition is labelling: song and film titles on music and movie channels, and series names and episode numbers on TV channels. On YouTube the title and the thumbnail appear side by side, so text that only repeats the title adds no new information; the other 55% use the thumbnail to say something the title doesn't.

Which kinds of channels use faces and text?

People channels put a human face on 100% of their thumbnails; Education channels on 50%. Kids' and animation channels lean on drawn characters instead, and music labels on cast photos with song titles.

What do the biggest creators' thumbnails look like?

MrBeast's 5 latest thumbnails all showed a human face (5 of 5) and 3 carried headline text. T-Series, a music label, showed a face on 5 of 5 and text on 5; Cocomelon showed drawn characters on 5 of 5. Every channel's counts are in the table below.

Every channel's thumbnails

Do faces get more clicks on YouTube?

This study can't say: it counts what the biggest channels put in their thumbnails, not what viewers click. The figure most often quoted for faces, "38% more", comes from a 2014 study by researchers at Georgia Tech and Yahoo Labs, Faces Engage Us, which found photos with faces in a random selection of 1.1 million Instagram photos were 38% more likely to get likes, not that YouTube thumbnails with faces get more clicks. Our thumbnail and CTR statistics trace that and other popular thumbnail figures to their sources, and summarize the independent studies of faces and text in thumbnails, which are observational.

To test a face on your own channel, YouTube's Test & Compare tool shows up to three thumbnails to viewers and picks a winner by watch time; how it decides is covered on the same page.

What this means if you make thumbnails

• A clear face is the default, not a rule. 78% of big channels' thumbnails show one, usually large. Channels that don't use a face use a drawn character or a strong scene instead.
• If you add text, keep it to a few words. The median is 3, and 55% of big channels' thumbnails have none.
• Make the text add something. 55% of big channels' thumbnail text adds words the title doesn't have; repeating the title wastes the space.
• Check legibility at phone size. Our thumbnail checker previews a thumbnail at the sizes YouTube shows it.

Mark Studios designs YouTube thumbnails and edits the videos behind them. This study uses the same list of channels as our upload time study and video length study.

How we ran the study

Thumbnails. The 487 videos are the latest regular uploads (not Shorts or live streams) of the channels in Wikipedia's list of the most-subscribed YouTube channels, 98 of its 100 (our collection missed Karla Bustillos, whose list entry links to youtube.com without the www, and Billion Surprise Toys, left out of the caption check with fewer than three readable regular uploads, has none here), five per channel (two for one channel), read on October 25, 2026 with the open-source yt-dlp tool for our caption coverage check. They were uploaded between 2020-10-26 and 2026-10-25. We downloaded each video's public thumbnail on October 26, 2026 at the largest size available (477 at 1280 x 720).

Labels. Each thumbnail was labelled against a written rubric by an AI vision model (Claude), one image at a time, with the full-size image opened whenever text was small or a face count was unclear. The rubric counts photographed human faces whose eyes are visible (tiny background faces excluded), sorts the largest face by height, marks an open mouth, and transcribes headline text while leaving out logos, credit lines, format badges and text that is part of the scene, such as signs. The labelling ran in three passes over consecutive blocks of thumbnails, all against the same rubric; afterwards one rule was applied to all 487: duration and format badges (“20 MIN”, “AUDIO”, “HD”) are not headline text, which changed 6 labels. Logos are recorded in the CSV but not reported, because the rubric's wording let in brand marks inside the scene.

Checking the labels. A second, independent pass relabelled 48 thumbnails (four sheets of twelve, about 10%) without seeing the first labels. Agreement, with Cohen's kappa (1 is perfect agreement; above 0.8 is usually read as near-perfect):

Each thumbnail counts once; per-category figures pool the thumbnails of channels in that category. None of the channels reviewed or endorsed this study.

Limitations

• The biggest channels, not all of YouTube. These 98 lean toward music, entertainment and kids' content, many in India and the U.S.
• Five recent thumbnails per channel. A channel's style can change from video to video; five is a snapshot.
• Labels are judgements. Face size and open mouths are the least certain labels (see the agreement table); borderline cases were flagged in the CSV.
• Use, not performance. We don't have click-through data, so nothing here says which style gets more clicks.
• Title comparison is Latin-script only. Text in other scripts wasn't compared with titles.

How to cite this study

Link to the section you use, for example https://www.markstudios.com/research/youtube-thumbnail-study#faces. To cite the study as a whole:

Mark Studios. "YouTube Thumbnail Study." Published Oct 29, 2026. https://www.markstudios.com/research/youtube-thumbnail-study

@misc{markstudios_youtube_thumbnail_study_2026,
  author = {{Mark Studios}},
  title = {{YouTube Thumbnail Study}},
  year = {2026},
  month = oct,
  url = {https://www.markstudios.com/research/youtube-thumbnail-study},
  note = {Last verified 2026-10-29}
}

Our labels and the CSVs are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0 with a link to this page. The thumbnails remain the property of the channels that published them.

Sources

Download the per-thumbnail labels (CSV) · Download the per-channel results (CSV)

Widely quoted video statistics on other topics are traced to their origin, with a verdict on each, in our research fact-check.

1. Wikipedia, List of most-subscribed YouTube channels (revision used). Accessed 2026-10-29.
2. yt-dlp, yt-dlp: a feature-rich command-line audio/video downloader. Accessed 2026-10-29.
3. Wikipedia, Cohen's kappa (agreement statistic). Accessed 2026-10-29.
4. Georgia Tech and Yahoo Labs, Faces Engage Us: Photos with Faces Attract More Likes and Comments on Instagram (CHI 2014). Accessed 2026-10-29.
5. Anthropic, Claude. Accessed 2026-10-29.

Update policy and change log

We plan to rerun the check every six months on the same list. Corrections go to contact@markstudios.com.

• Oct 29, 2026: First published: 487 thumbnails from 98 of the most-subscribed channels.