Speaker 1: As a new YouTuber, John would spend hours sketching out thumbnails. He would edit them tirelessly. But nobody was clicking on his videos. His views flatlined. Tens of views if he was lucky. His channel was going nowhere. Dude. Oh, you're here. Sorry John, just trying to set the scene a little bit. Anyway, what John didn't realize here is that his thumbnails were actually works of art, but they weren't good enough to compel anybody to click on the videos themselves. In a really good Twitter thread, J-Alto wrote about how creators make the mistake of focusing too much on the design rather than the psychology behind their thumbnails. In Jay's words, People don't click art. They click on a video they want to watch. Prioritize capturing why your video is worth your viewer's time. Let's put it this way. Imagine your favorite director is about to release a new movie. The job of the teaser trailer is to hint to the potential viewer, the fan of the director, that all the things you want out of this type of movie are going to be in the movie. Similarly, your thumbnail plays a crucial role into getting people to understand what your video is about. As Jay put it, the potential viewer knows nothing about your video. Assume your viewer knows nothing, and build your thumbnail accordingly. And that's great advice, especially if you're a small channel. If nobody is actively looking for your channel, but the algorithm gives one of your videos a chance anyway, you get maybe a split second to try and stop their scrolling and capture their attention. To do that, just like John, you need to do your research. Collect thumbnails that stand out to you, and try to spot patterns in those thumbnails even if you're not looking at videos from your niche. Pick out the thumbnails that raise your curiosity, and then break them down into their various elements. I want you to analyze how each of these elements of a thumbnail makes you feel. Speaking of curiosity, a master at raising curiosity in a thumbnail and a script would be, in my opinion, Ryan Trahan. He made this video that should have performed really well. The thumbnail looked good. He nailed the editing. Video retention was even high, but the video just wasn't getting any clicks. He was pretty baffled, until he saw the thumbnail in dark mode on his phone. By simply changing the thumbnail's background from dark to bright green, Ryan saved his video. The thing is, a lot of YouTubers end up making their thumbnails on maybe a big 4K monitor, and they're really incensed by all the big, bright elements on the screen. But there's an important element of this that's easy to miss, even if you have experience, and that is that most people will be maybe scrolling on their phone, they're going to see this thumbnail in a much smaller size. That means your thumbnails need to be simple. They need to be high contrast with visually striking details, and you need to leave all those tiny little details out of the thumbnail. Mobile comes first now, because a thumbnail that could do very well on a TV or desktop mode could completely flop on mobile. One design trick I'm sure you've seen a million times across YouTube would be the YouTuber face thumbnails. You know the ones. The face takes up like half the screen, and it's always in some kind of weird expression that people wouldn't normally make in their day-to-day lives. These close-up faces, though, can't help but make some kind of human emotional connection. Depending on your niche, though, even if it's not a face, you can still adopt this tactic for your own thumbnails. That's because close-ups of intriguing objects or gadgets also work. Maybe it's a cute animal, or maybe it's some cheese melting off the tip of a slice of pizza. Having these details, these nice big elements, already help viewers start to understand what your video's about before they've even clicked on it. You mean like this? Ugh. Not exactly. Just make sure when you're creating your thumbnail, using other elements can help as well. You can leverage arrows, or symbols, or even fingers pointing at key details. These can quickly direct a viewer's eye all across the thumbnail. Take this strategy, used all the time by Mr. Beast. Playing with perspective to add intrigue. A tiny person next to a giant object. Flat versus detailed. Again, it all makes people curious as to what else is in this video. The goal here is to create a journey from the thumbnail to even the title. If people are willing to follow that journey with both of those elements, they've kind of already started watching the video. They could already be hooked, making them way more likely to actually click. That's why it's so important that your title compliments your thumbnail, or vice versa, and not have these two things repeat each other. You can use words to amplify the title and add some intrigue. Not too many though. Overall, you want to always be avoiding clutter. Big bold text can add emphasis, while smaller text can help allude to maybe a payoff. You can use text, but not too much, to give your viewers some clues, but not give everything away. Well, you would think that once your thumbnail leaves its editing software, you're done. Turns out that's not the case. I would advise that you start tracking which of your thumbnails have performed better than others. You want to always be testing what's working best in your niche and on your channel. One tool you can use to get some extra help with this is ThumbnailPreview.com. This will help you visualize what your thumbnail looks like on an actual YouTube page. Wow, yeah, this looks like trash. Keep testing different thumbnails over and over until you get one that starts to stand out from the rest. And once that video's finally posted, you can use our tools, vidIQ or YouTube Studio, just to track and see how it does over the long run, so you can inform decisions about future thumbnails and future titles. Wow, I gotta admit, I was kinda worried there for a minute, but hey, not bad. Well, thanks. The truth is, though, a high click-through rate is not going to do a whole lot for your watch time or your video's longevity, so let's get to work on your editing. That video is right here.