They claim that they only create clickbait because the platform requires it, but that argument is undercut a bit by the fact that they use the same playbook on floatplane.
They are not being honest when they say they have to do it for clicks. They have to do it to monetize attention when it is most important to their brand. After that they have sacrificed any long-term value. This is also why they have to create new content all the time at all costs. It is unsustainable and why youtube creators burn out. I hope they invested their money well before that happens.
> Clickbait is a sensationalized headline that encourages you to click a link to an article, image, or video. Instead of presenting objective facts, clickbait headlines often appeal to your emotions and curiosity. Once you click, the website hosting the link earns revenue from advertisers, but the actual content is usually of questionable quality and accuracy. Websites use clickbait to draw in as many clicks as possible, thus increasing their ad revenue.[0]
In Tom Scott's case, the video thumbnails look flashy but are accurate and representative of the video.
I think a good example of clickbait vs non-clickbait according to this definition would be Jazza vs NerdForge. I stopped watching Jazza because he would put great looking art in the thumbnail slightly blurred out, and the actual video would be about everything except that artwork. Whereas Nerdforge will show a huge piece of beautiful art, and that's what the whole video is about.
Just because someone presents their work well doesn't mean it's clickbait. And this is an age old problem, it's the reason we have the idiom "don't judge a book by its cover". I appreciate the effort people like Tom Scott, Sebastian Lague, and Nerdforge put into their thumbnails, because a picture is worth 1000 words and they use their thumbnails to paint that picture.
[0]: https://edu.gcfglobal.org/en/thenow/what-is-clickbait/1/#
I'm not sure I agree with this analysis
Edit: To clarify, when I say "clickbait" here, I am using it as a neutral term referring to any materials used to convince someone to click on a link. I understand that it is kind of a loaded term and it is not used anywhere in the extension itself because of this.
The title of this post seems to be taken from the satire title on my YouTube video demo. If you install the plugin and view the video from there, there is a better title. It was meant as a demo of the extension.
However, I'm not sure a random screenshot, or any still frame from the middle of a video is a better replacement for a custom thumbnail.
The only benefit I see of something like that is to explicitly reduce irritation of stupid thumbnails, not to improve your ability to find content you care for. And if you get emotionally worked up enough because of stupid youtube thumbnails that you must change them to something that's obviously just as random, you might need more meditation. It's just youtube, it's not worth it.
Edit: this video shows the old and new styles: https://youtu.be/CcyTzhrN6bM
Linus Tech Tips famously ran an experiment several years ago (and I believe have rerun it a few times since then) and determined that, even though they hated doing it, videos which used clickbait titles and thumbnails got consistently got 20% higher engagement than ones that didn’t use clickbait.[2] I’ve also heard anecdotal numbers even higher than that, and there’s a knock-on effect as YouTube tends to promote channels with consistently high performance way more frequently (this is why big Game Theory uploads instantly and consistently show up in everyone’s recommendations).
This isn’t a complaint about your tool at all, don’t misunderstand me. I just wanted to point out that most of these big channels are their creator’s primary business, and it’s gotten very difficult to be successful at YouTube without resorting to algorithm tricks like these.
[1]: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/3382248
[2]: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DzRGBAUz5mA
Edit: Ah, yeah, I missed your “It's no one's fault. It's a system that creates a race to the bottom.” text on the page. You already probably know all of this.
I will add an addendum in response to “Many have even started going through their entire backlog, changing old titles and thumbnails to be more attention grabbing and vague.” because I actually know how that got started.
About a year or two ago, the late great Minecraft streamer Technoblade ran into an issue where it turned out that one of the community-made thumbnails on one of his videos had used traced art. He quickly sourced a replacement piece and updated the thumbnail, but then quickly noticed something interesting happen: YouTube treated the thumbnail update almost like a new upload, and that video showed back up in people’s recommendations, accordingly with a massive bump in views. He tried this with a few other videos, sometimes changing the title as well, and got similar results.
Other YouTubers began to copy this strategy, and it was ultimately discovered that updating the title or thumbnail caused Google to “re-crunch” the video in terms of the algorithm, and applying the most popular current title and thumbnail styles were led to a serious increase in recommendations and views, even if the video was several years old by that point. Many YouTubers began to abuse this, updating their videos with “modern” metadata stylings, and since then it’s become standard practice for big YouTubers and has led to a serious increase in growth for them.
Once again, it’s an algorithm problem and not an individual YouTuber problem, but that’s what started the most recent trend of editing the metadata on old videos rather than just applying it to new uploads.
I agree that CGP Grey isn't the best example though, his thumbnails seem to just broadly be those little cartoons as they always were