Speaker 1: I'm going to share with you 11 thumbnail design hacks some of the top creators on YouTube are using right now to skyrocket their growth on YouTube. When it comes to thumbnails, your CTR, or click-through rate, matters a lot. CTR is a metric that measures the amount of people who clicked on your thumbnail based on the amount of people it was shown to. For example, if you have a CTR of 7%, that means out of 100 people it was shown to, 7 of them clicked on it. The average CTR on YouTube is between 2 and 10%, and the best creators are getting above the average, and you can too. If you have a low percentage, let's be honest, you have a boring thumbnail and that won't get views. If you have a high one, that's where the magic lies, and that's where you can get more views, make more money, and start to grow your channel. Let's dive in. First, bright gets it right, dark misses the mark. Bright and contrasting colors on your thumbnails are a great strategy to draw people's attention. Let's compare these two videos. Which one would you want to click on? The one on the left or the one on the right? Using contrasting colors and vibrant colors help draw the viewer's eye to your thumbnail. Remember, your thumbnail gets placed amongst dozens of other thumbnails. Having a great thumbnail that stands out makes your video the easy option to click on. HD is key. High-quality images are crucial. Having crisp, high-resolution images ensure that thumbnails look clean and professional. This thumbnail is clean and crisp, and psychologically what's happening is it's communicating to the audience that this is a good thumbnail, it looks great, I gotta watch this. The best way to capture high-quality images for your thumbnails is using your phone or a camera to capture the best photo possible, not using a still image from your video. That's lower quality. Close-ups. Taking close-up shots of faces showing strong emotions to create a personal and emotional connection is a great strategy for creating thumbnails. I even use TubeBuddy on this channel, on my channel, to see which thumbnails are resonating best with the audience, what emotions I'm using in my thumbnails, whether I show my face or not, that way I can get data to know what to do next. Close-ups like this psychologically communicate to the viewer the emotion in the video. Why is he shocked? Is he happy at what he's looking at? It makes you want to find out what's going on. Another example here is great. This makes me curious as to why he's even sitting in a shopping cart and if he's gonna be okay here and why are the shelves so empty and did it get this bad in the video? The less, the better. That is, with the text you use on your thumbnails. Minimal text is always the goal. Using minimal but impactful text to convey the message of the video without cluttering the thumbnail and distracting the audience is exactly what you want to aim for. This thumbnail here uses little words and allows for the text to support the title of the video along with communicating a message in the photo itself. This thumbnail gets me curious because it's saying if he quit his 9 to 5 and made billions, how did he do it? I need to know. He's clearly flying on a private plane so it must be true. Having the look. This one is underrated and highly overlooked. That's why I call it having the look because if you look at the channel that I just showed you, if you scroll through Noah's thumbnails, they follow a certain style and they all look alike. GQ Sports does this as well. They follow this with their series on 10 things blank can't live without. The background of their thumbnail is the exact same design every time and you begin to become familiar with it. Psychologically, this builds familiarity with the audience and they begin to know what your thumbnails look like and they can recognize your videos just by the thumbnail alone. I look at these videos and I already know what they're about because I see them so often when I just scroll on YouTube. Having consistent fonts, colors, and logos are key so your audience can establish a consistent brand and identity with your thumbnails. Before and afters. Before and afters create a massive amount of curiosity for the audience to want to click. Showing a transformation or comparison using before and afters is great. This is one of my favorite channels on YouTube, Gravity Transformation. They do a great job of showing before and after thumbnails by showing a situation on the left side and a different version on the right. And you'll notice they incorporate the branding component in there as well, like we just talked about. Keep in mind, you don't have to just be a fitness channel. You can show before and afters with anything. Whether it's a new desk setup, a new room setup, a home renovation, a recipe, the possibilities are endless. Here's a key tip. If you are making before and after thumbnails, pay attention. I know this may sound obvious. On the left-hand side, that is the before. And on the right, that is the after. I see so many channels mixing this up and it's confusing to the audience. Massive error. Do not do this. Use graphics. Eye-catching graphics are a unique way to communicate to the audience what is happening without using any words. Take this one for example. I personally am a massive football fan and I've never seen this video before. When I saw it roll across my feed, I said to myself, did he actually wear a camera? And then I said, wow, that must be the POV shot of him playing on the field. I have to watch this. That's so cool. Finding ways where you can communicate to the audience what is happening without having to tell them and you can show them will win. Take action. Action shots, great strategy to capture people's attention. One of the best thumbnails that does this perfectly is from Dude Perfect when they went to space. It creates a level of intrigue and excitement because you want to see in that moment what happened when they got to that point in the video. Here's the thing. If you are using action shots in your video, you must, I mean, must deliver. This channel is one I watch all the time because I'm a massive aviation fan and what's happening in the thumbnail is always happening in the video because they use an action shot and a screen grab from the video as their thumbnail. It works for them. Let's be honest. No one wants to be baited into a video from a thumbnail that didn't deliver in the video at all. That is clickbait and no one will come back to watch your videos. Test, test, test. A and B testing is a great strategy, underrated, but a great strategy for this. Creating different variations for your thumbnails is something to consider. Personally, one of my favorite features with using TubeBuddy is the A-B testing feature. I even used it on a video that I thought the original thumbnail was better and I ran the test and the variation ended up winning. With A-B testing, specifically with TubeBuddy, a thumbnail will be swapped out every 24 hours so the same audiences are promoted different variations and you can see which one the audience liked better. It's great feedback for you to see what the audience likes and what they don't like. Optimize for mobile and TV. When creating a thumbnail, you should take into account how it looks on mobile and on TV. That's because 45% of viewership of YouTube is happening on TV. Honestly, before I made this video, I didn't even know that. That's wild to me, meaning you need to stand out. One of my favorite ways to do this is use Thumbnail Check, a phenomenal website to ensure that your thumbnail and title is up to par with best practices and that your title doesn't get cut off when people are surfing YouTube. Finally, do your research. This goes overlooked heavily. See what's working out there. Search to see what other people in your niche, industry are doing. It's a great way for you to collect data on what's working right now and what people are resonating with. Check the colors, the branding, the style of thumbnail, then check the views on the video. I guarantee you, if there's a high view count with a solid thumbnail, it means people are clicking on it to watch and they're interested. That is 11, that's 10, 11 thumbnail design hacks that top creators are using right now on YouTube to grow their channel, get more views, and make more money. If you enjoyed this video, you're going to love this one right here, where I share with you five strategies that you can use in 2024 with your YouTube shorts. I'll see you there.