Until last year, most search engine results were text only and looked pretty bland.  The only way to stand out in the crowd was to be at the top of the list.  Then came Google’s revolutionary universal search, which introduced among other things thumbnails of video on Google's search results page.  It’s made a big impact, and other search engines like Yahoo and AOL have followed suit.

Sure, it seems obvious that an image or thumbnail in a sea of text is going to stand out and draw the user’s eye, but there’s proof that it works.  Google has been testing videos in their paid advertisements to compete for user’s attention.  In this New York Times article Marissa Mayer, Google’s vice president of search products and user experience tells us that "text ads are not as effective on pages with search results that include images and video. The eyes of users automatically gravitate to the images more than the text."  This also implies that regular text-only search results are also not as effective on pages with images and video.

So the value of a video thumbnail is clear.  If you want to stand out from the competition on the search engines, then the best option right now is to invest in online video.

Stephen Kmetz