I'm with Gini--if the art is what matters, the artist's name need not be shown in the thumbnail at all. What you get otherwise is a 'cult of the personality.' With the ebot alerts letting us know when a favorite artist has posted and a link, it's not like we ever have to miss out on a single post by the artists we like best. So why put artists' names on thumbs? And Thip is correct--artistic merit and sales/views correlate only partially. It's just not as straight-forward as DL numbers for models or sales for merchants. It's a lot easier to show a model or product's worth in a thumbnail than it is to show all the (very subjective) qualities that make up a really good image....Even if you simply show the whole image in the thumb, it will be too small and of too poor quality to accurately show what the finished piece is going to look like--I've clicked on ones that showed decent compositional skills, only to encounter sloppy texturing or lazy posing. Just the kind of image that is crying out for someone to respectfully critique....And just the image that may be overlooked if a popular artist has posted nearby and everybody spends their precious gallery time on that image instead.