Your best thumbnail tips

Sleepingbutterfly

Sleepingbutterfly

Member
Red circles, an extreme video title and some explosions – voila! A thumbnail for your channel. It may be successful. But is it ok? I mean a lot of YouTubers who use this technique have children as their audience. But do you wanna have an audience who is full of youngsters. Is it worth? Do you wanna have an easy-to-manipulate fandom? If your answer is “No!”, good. Share your best thumbnail tips here. So, we can create good thumbnail without clickbait for a better audience …
 
Hi!

If you’re using text on the thumbnail, make it large so it can be seen. Also, the text should be short/tell the viewer the subject of the video
 
Contrast and how much the letters "pop up" from the screen matter a lot more than you think. I recently switched from a "black background on the left + raw drawing on the right" combination that I've stuck with for more than a year, to a gray pattern that spans over the whole image, removing the background from fantasy character drawings to make them blend in a bit more with the background. I also started using a 10px thick black stroke around the text. This makes the letters pop out much more while still having a humanoid figure on the thumbnail to draw the necessary attention.

My latest video ("The Bullet Teaser") finally broke 15% CTR for the first 2 days. Yellow color definitely works better than orange/red, at least for my channel. I still have to test out the good ol' green and maybe cyan/light blue with this newest thumbnail style. I had "fast start" videos before with 20%+ CTR in the first hour, only to plummet down to below 10% for the rest of the day. This one maintained above 15% CTR for the first 1 day 18 hours and that gives me hope I might finally start riding the 10%+ CTR train consistently.

I'm frankly tired of seeing my videos getting absolutely shot down by the algorithm because they can't get more than 10% CTR, so I'm trying hard to improve that.
 
@Min/Max Munchking I wanna make curious. But not those clickbate à la Jake Paul. I'm on the beauty, fashion and lifestyle genre. That's a bit different. BTW, there is whole psychology about colors. Red makes aggressive and maybe lovely. It's a warning signal! Yellow is a traitor's color at least in politician way. Green means eco. And so on. I wanna have a female audience. So, I'm gonna use pink and purple colors mainly.
 
It really depends on what style you want, but here are some general tips:

- Develop a template and stick with it (for a while). This makes you thumbnails recognizable for your audience.

- Keep it SIMPLE! Do not add too many elements and text to it, since the image will be really small.

- Test your thumbnail by shrinking it in your editing program or zoom out on it. Is the text readable? Are all elements clear?

- Don't put your full title on the thumbnail. It takes up space and doesn't add anything.

- Instead, add to your title with buzz words. Are you doing a make up video on bright colored mascaras? Your title can be something like "Trying out crazy mascara colors!", while the text on your thumbnail maybe says "Trying BLUE mascara!"

- Use either bright colors or stick to black and white. Nothing is quite as effective/readable as white text with a black outline. Do outline whatever text you use, for readability. Don't worry to much about the subliminal messaging of colors, it's more important which colors catch the eye.

- For personality based channels (travel, gaming, beauty) it has proven more effective to put your face in the thumbnail.

- Touch up your thumbnail screenshots. Blur backgrounds, enhance contrast, up vibrancy. All this will help your thumbnail POP.

Hope all this helps :)
 
I think my magic charm is a face on the thumbnail looking at the text on the thumbnail....The text should be the core words of the Title. People turn to follow the direction someone is look ...that way viewers will be able to read the text which is short and doesn't reveal more than what's in the title forcing viewers to click throw
 
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