A prediction market mockup for videos and thumbnails

The line you don’t cross with a thumbnail

A thumbnail is seen by far more people than the video behind it, and none of them get the context. So two rules hold harder here than anywhere else. Don’t put a believable market on a real election or a real person in a thumbnail: without the video around it, it’s misinformation, whatever the video says. And don’t make a mockup that claims a win. A thumbnail, post or story presenting a market screen as your own bet — to sell picks, promote a paid group, advertise a giveaway or get viewers to stake money — is prohibited, and accounts that do it are closed. A mockup that’s plainly a mockup — an explainer graphic, a parody, a scene in a skit — is what this is for. The acceptable use policy has the rest.

If you were looking for a prediction market simulator

Plainly: this isn’t somewhere to practise trading. Pozer’s prediction market template is a prop — a screen that looks and behaves like a prediction market on camera. There’s no order book and nobody on the other side. Prices sit exactly where you type them and never move on their own. A buy takes the cost out of a cash balance you typed, a position can be added to or replaced but never sold, and nothing resolves or pays out. You would learn nothing from it about how real prices form or how a position behaves.

If practice is what you want, look for a tool built for it, with a real order book and play money, and read its rules first. If “simulator” meant a screen that responds like the real thing in a video, read on.

A still or the app: let the shot decide

The same template gives you both.

• A still, for thumbnails, title cards, slides and graphics laid over footage. Build the screen in the editor and press Export PNG (3x). You don’t need an account, and nothing gets published.
• The app, for anything a hand touches or a camera moves around. Publish it, install it on the phone and film it, or screen-record it for a clean insert. A still can’t scroll or open a keypad, and it gives itself away the moment a finger lands on the glass.

Getting a sharp still

The editor’s preview is the template itself, drawn by the same code as the published app, so what you see is what you export. Five things are worth knowing about the export.

• It’s the screen alone — no phone frame, no reflection, no status bar — at three times the screen’s resolution. That leaves room to scale it up for a thumbnail, or to drop the whole screen into a phone mockup of your own.
• On the free plan it carries the mark, as the app does: SIMULATED · POZER.COM across the portfolio value on the Portfolio tab, and about a third of the way down the markets feed. Pro, at US$12.99/mo, exports a clean screen.
• It captures whichever screen the preview is on. The preview’s tabs and chips respond to clicks, so you can export the Portfolio or a filtered list as easily as the home screen.
• The keypad and the receipt aren’t in it. Yes and No do nothing in the editor, because the sheet they open only exists in the published app. For a still of a receipt, publish, install, tap through on the phone and take a screenshot there.
• It’s portrait, in a modern phone’s proportions of roughly 9 by 19.5. A landscape thumbnail takes a crop of it, or stands the whole screen beside the subject.

Replace the placeholders before you export

A still gets looked at longer than a moving shot, and a few defaults give a template away to anyone who pauses on it.

• @yourhandle. It’s the default Handle, printed at the top right of the Portfolio. Change it, or keep it out of the crop.
• “Will it happen?” at 62%. Every event added with + add row starts as that, with $1.8M of volume. One left behind reads as a placeholder, because it is one.
• The same holder count twice. A new event starts with 906 holders, the same figure as the default Fed card. Two cards showing 906 on one screen look copied, so change one.

Which screen to show

• Home, for the market itself: the cards, the chips and the cash pill. It’s the screen that says “this is a prediction market” fastest.
• Search, for a looked-it-up moment. The field on that screen accepts typing in the preview too, so the export can show a query and the cards it matched.
• Portfolio, for a position: Value, Invested, Return and Cash, and each position with its average price and profit. It’s the screen that shows a win, which is why it’s the one the line at the top of this guide is most about.

Designing it for a thumbnail

A thumbnail is judged at the size of a thumbnail, so build the screen for that size rather than shrinking a busy one.

• One event. The home screen is a list, and at thumbnail size four cards are texture. Delete down to the event the video is about and it sits alone under the chips, with dark screen below it.
• The chance card. The half-dial is the one element that reads at a glance, because it’s drawn to the percentage: 9% leaves the arc nearly empty and 91% nearly full, so the shape carries the number even where the digits are too small to read. A list card’s rows of small buttons don’t survive the shrink.
• A short question. On a chance card the question shares the width with the dial, and a long one wraps line after line down the card.
• Your palette. Accent recolours the round mark, the cash pill, the chips and the tabs, and Background sets the screen, so the mockup can sit in the thumbnail’s colours. The Yes and No buttons stay green and red and the dial stays green, which is what tells a viewer what they’re looking at.
• A crop inside the screen. The top row — the app name and the cash pill — and the chips say what kind of app this is; the card tells the story. Most thumbnails need the card and a sliver of the header, not the whole phone.

If the screen will be seen at full size, the checks that make any fake market hold up apply as well — two-sided cards adding to about 100, daily markets whose volume is mostly today’s. They’re in the fake Polymarket generator guide.

Inside the video: cut-ins and explainers

When the market appears inside the video rather than on its cover, film the installed app, or screen-record it, instead of laying a still over the footage. A recording can do what a still can’t: scroll the list, tap a chip, type into Search, tap Yes and let the receipt print. Record the moves the edit needs and nothing more. Nothing on this screen changes unless you tap it, so a long hold on an untouched screen is a still with extra steps. Filming it in someone’s hand is covered in how to film a prediction market skit.

For an explainer, the template’s arithmetic is sound enough to show on screen. The chance and the Yes price are the same number. No is priced at 100 minus Yes plus the spread you set. A share pays one unit of currency if it lands, which is why the receipt’s To win line equals the number of shares. And Portfolio values each position at the current price, so its profit is the gap between that price and your average. Say on screen that the market is a mockup, and keep its events fictional or plainly silly, so a frame lifted from the video can’t pass for a real one.