Which emotion is the best for thumbnails? Depends who you ask.

The art of thumbnail creation has evolved into a precise process practiced by YouTube’s smartest voices. The face-focused thumbnail design of MrBeast has become a sitewide trend as creators big and small look to reap the viewership benefits of highly clickable preview images.

Making a face in one’s YouTube thumbnails has become widespread, but which face performs the best? Should the featured creator look happy or sad? Should their mouth be open or closed?

Kapwing has provided some data related to those questions. The video editing app teamed up with marketing agency NeoMam Studios to determine the most common thumbnail faces used by some of YouTube’s biggest stars.

The study used AI facial recognition technology to categorize thumbnails into seven emotional groups: Happy, sad, angry, calm, surprised, fearful, and confused. Each creator’s library was then arranged into a pie chart, with each emotion accounting for a percentage of the total thumbnail volume.

Though MrBeast’s ideas on thumbnails have inspired many copycats, not all creators are sticking close to Jimmy Donaldson’s advice. The main MrBeast channel features all seven of the measured emotions in its images, though happiness was far and away the most common reaction in MrBeast thumbnails. The same can be said for the thumbnails of PewDiePie and KSI.

But other top channels seem to prioritize a small subset of the measured emotions, rather than utilizing all seven. Mark Rober‘s thumbnails are entirely happy and calm, while Ludwig‘s all feature confusion, happiness, or fear. 70% of SSSniperWolf‘s thumbnails show surprise, which doesn’t exactly mesh with her personality.

On the whole, the positive emotions showed up more frequently in the measured thumbnails. Surprise and happiness both appeared in nearly 27% of the listed videos, with calm in third place and both sadness and disgust coming in below 2% on that axis. But some creators chose to buck trends. The Stokes Twins, for example, are not afraid to show a fearful thumbnail.

“I originally thought that angry or sad video previews would get the most clicks, but this data shows that successful YouTube creators prefer using a happy or surprised face in their thumbnails,” said Kapwing Co-Founder Eric Lu in a statement. “I interpret that to mean that viewers like watching (and engaging with) positive content on YouTube. Hopefully, this also means that up-and-coming creators on YouTube will also focus on creating more positive content overall.”

Another takeaway concerns the universality of these faces and the emotions they represent. Though YouTube’s top creators may use differing strategies for their thumbnails, they’re all relying on familiar faces to allow their videos to translate across cultural divisions. If that notion surprises you, I have a reaction face with your name on it.