We’ve been developing an exciting new feature that lets you customize thumbnails for different user segments, enhancing the appeal of your experiences. Starting July 8th, we’ll kick off a small-scale experiment to test its effectiveness. Below, we share the details of the experiment and how you can participate.
Why Personalized Thumbnails?
Today, your thumbnails are fixed and visible to all users. By tailoring thumbnails to specific demographics or interests, you have more agency and a higher likelihood of attracting the right audience and increasing engagement to your creations.
What’s the Plan?
On July 8th, we’ll be kicking off a small-scale experiment, impacting 5% of your traffic. During this experiment, we’ll gauge the effectiveness of existing thumbnails in appealing to various user groups. For example, we’ll assess whether certain thumbnails resonate better with younger users versus older users.
How to Participate
Ensure your experiences have rich and diverse 16:9 thumbnails uploaded to Roblox by July 8, 2024. Experiences with two or more thumbnails will automatically qualify for the experiment. Check out our new thumbnails guide for optimization tips!
The experiment will run for two weeks, ending on July 22. Since it’s a small-scale test, you shouldn’t notice any significant impacts on your day-to-day metrics.
Next Steps
We’ll share performance insights from the experiment and outline the timeline for the public beta of this feature soon. In the meantime, if you have any questions or need assistance, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.
That’s a very great change! I’ve been looking for ways to make both older / younger people notice my experience (which has less than 1000 visits btw lol, but it shows in some people’s homepages but nobody clicks it ) and it’s because it’s so hard to make a thumbnail that everyone likes, and with this change I can now make multiple thumbnails and Roblox will automatically do the rest for me :)
To my knowledge A/B testing finds the best performing thumbnail and then you have to set a permanent thumbnail that’ll show to all users no matter their age/region etc.
But this update will probably be like:
Roblox will perform tests on your thumbnails and then for example 2-year-olds click your 1st thumbnail more, and 15-year-olds click your 2nd thumbnail more, so it’ll show most 2-year-olds your first thumbnail, and 15-year-olds your second thumbnail.
This is an interesting experiment! Overall being able to optimize icons/thumbnails for age groups and platforms would be a great feature to fit multiple audiences.
Personalizing the metadata can do a lot to improve relevance and make the platform appeal to older audiences. Good space to set big steps in!
For clarity’s sake, does this include video thumbnails or is this excluded to just image thumbnails?
I presume the latter, but thumbnails as a whole refers to both types.
So is Roblox just testing all thumbnails I have uploaded for the games landing page? I know the first thumbnail will be used as the thumbnail shown to users for discovery before this update, but now I’m confused.
I have screenshots of levels in my game on my game landing page. I don’t want those to be pushed as the face of my game for discovery. I guess I’m looking for more of a concrete explanation of what images are shows and if I have a say in what thumbnails do.
On the note of age, I wonder what makes a thumbnail appeal to certain groups. I assume a simple icon (not difficult to understand what’s going on), no text, and depiction of gameplay is what makes a good thumbnail. Maybe that is less or more accurate depending on age or other factors.
That’s why it would be interesting to confirm or reject the hypothesis. For my genre, I would assume younger age groups to prefer bright thumbnails (with perhaps more social features) and older age groups to click quicker on serious action thumbnails. Right now we have no proper A/B tooling for this.
great! this works, for example, for people speaking a differnt language. if the user speaks spanish and i speak english, they will see the translated one i made.
An diagramm where you can see what and how many people joined to what thumbnail?
It could be more complicated than I think because of the detection of the thumbnail that was visible to the joined player but that depends on how it’s built.
Will there be one? That’d be very helpful.
Appreciate the feature and your hard & creative work!
Ty
) and it’s because it’s so hard to make a thumbnail that everyone likes, and with this change I can now make multiple thumbnails and Roblox will automatically do the rest for me :)