Sometime ago Facebook used to allow embedding a YouTube video so that people can watch a YouTube video while still on Facebook. Then Facebook started their own video section and wanted people instead to watch Facebook’s video only so they stopped the option to embed YouTube videos. In an attempt to drive less traffic to YouTube, Facebook even decided to show tiny ugly thumbnails whenever a YouTube link is shared on Facebook.
A lot of YouTube to Facebook publishing websites emerged to fix this problem but this services suffer from low New Feed distribution as they are probably used by a lot of people for sharing YouTube video and considered spammy.
So, I was looking for the best way to publish a YouTube video to Facebook with it’s full thumbnail and maintaining the YouTube authority. So, if Facebook intentionally did this, it means that they have a check somewhere that looks like:
if ($domain === “m.youtube.com” || $domain === “www.youtube.com”) {
// then fuck up the thumb
}
So, I started digging for other subdomain or TLDs owned by YouTube that do not redirect to m.youtube.com/www.youtube.com/youtube-nocookie.com… with the hope that Facebook did not include those in the ‘blacklist’.
So after trying several of them, fortunately, I came across gaming.youtube.com, the YouTube Gaming App companion site. The good thing about this was any normal YouTube video would work by just changing the https://www.youtube.com to https://gaming.youtube.com and Facebook would show the full thumbnail and you have full post reach since the YouTube domain is trusted. Additional traction comes from the full thumbnail.
Like what they say, all good things come to an end, on May 30th, YouTube shutdown this service and this subdomain now redirects you to youtube.com/gaming which brings us to the original problem of shitty YouTube thumbnails on Facebook.
This was kept secret for obvious reasons but I am sure there were a lot of people using it.
C:\Windows\Help 