May I ask a not so smart question... What is the big deal with thumbnails for YouTube videos. Like, I am always hearing about these thumbnails as if they can make or break a video/channels outcomes.
I've interacted with Google, Meta, Amazon, Twitch engineers. But yet to with a YouTube engineer.
Sydney, where I used to work for them, is pretty good; New York is decent. But I was rather underwhelmed by my visits to Mountain View.
Traditional print publishers put lots of efforts into making the covers of their books and magazines attractive and indicative of what you can expect inside.
You _can_ judge a book by its cover, _if_ the publisher is doing their job right.
Why would online video be any different?
That would be like saying you can judge the quality of a cereal-brand by its box. Special-K? That is really special.
The Book might be full of lies or incorrect information no matter how beautiful its cover is.
You can judge the quality of the cover of the book by looking at the cover. :-)
> The Book might be full of lies or incorrect information no matter how beautiful its cover is.
Cereal "might be", but almost nobody has motivation to do so — this is market differentiation to tell you what you're buying.
Compare and contrast:
https://i5.walmartimages.com/seo/Kellogg-s-Special-K-Origina...
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=budget+cornflakes&t=iphone&iar=ima...
https://www.kaufland.de/product/338169035/?search_value=cere...
None of these will be surprise Weetabix in soy sauce. None is actually a frozen pizza. None is garden fertiliser.
Similar with books and youtube videos. It's not a claim that "beauty is truth and truth beauty", it's a claim the thumbnail/cover tells you what the video/book is about.
For "quality"? Good branding used to be expensive, before GenAI (now I'm not sure). If you could afford it, you could afford good content; if you could only afford good branding or good content but not both… it happens, of course, but it leads to angry refund demands IRL, and no organic viral growth for videos.
Of course, their ideals will most likely differ from your ideals. In addition, even where multiple people might share abstract ideals, their ideas about how to effect these ideals will often differ.
The "kids just lack manners these days" should also be separated from more detailed criticism.
That whole thing about denying that decadence is even possible is so comically a symptom of people being part of said decadence not wanting to admit it.
From my other post:
Overall, when the parents lose control of the child, the culture takes over parenting. When the culture is ridiculous, the child grows to become a ridiculous adult and won't know it and possibly even defend it.
It's absolutely accurate that `kids these days` have grown up in a different environment than `grownups these days` than the same demographics from 50, 100, 200, or 1000 years ago.
Even if it's for the sake of feeding the algorithm, I do my best to skip them.
I also internally prioritize videos which:
- avoid usage of superlatives "TOP X", "BEST OF Y"
- have more than 5k views and less than 250k views.
After a while, my YT recommendations have become mostly solid.
1: https://allscience.substack.com/p/on-the-grim-reality-of-you...
( ͡ಠ ʖ̯ ͡ಠ)
(fixed it for you)
Entirely conjecture on my part, but I imagine this _was_ true, has now been done to death, and no longer has any juice left in it. It’s how all the marketing stuff goes: discovered, early adopters get great results, everyone starts doing it and it loses any value.
You might still lose out, if you don't do it?
Just like virtually every car these days has great safety features, so it's not a good selling point; but just try selling a car with 1980s levels of safety.
Plenty of good content is forced to play the clickbait thumbnail/title game and it would be a shame to miss some of it because of YouTube's incentive problems.
TOP 10 BEST
When you have "top" and a word ending with "est" in the same headline, you've done it wrong.
I never avoided these. They naturally make me puke and disgust and want to smash their degenerate faces if I ever see one on the street. No need for doing my best. The realization that so many people happily click through that was sickening at the time. It’s “open doors” party in asylum and people rushing in in excitement.
Btw, many channels seem to moved on from that, in self-moderation after a short period of experiments. Those who stuck to it showed the most increase in mental deficiency and turning to stupid comedy/meme show rather than original material. One example of that were these new LTT formats, afair.
You're supposed to smash the like button and remember to comment and subscribe.
Youtube's "the algorithm" will make or break both videos and channels.
But "the algorithm" isn't really a mystery. At a basic level, it just shows a bunch of video recommendations to viewers, and measures if they click it or not (watch time, comments, likes also factor into the algorithm, but none of that matters if they don't click first). The higher the click-through rate, the more the video is pushed in recommendations.
And the only things a viewer sees is the thumbnail, channel name, and video title. They have to decide which video they are going to watch based on just that.
So really, a large chunk of "the algorithm" is just how appealing your thumbnail is to potential views.
More or less, the art of making a successful video requires:
* An attention-grabbing thumbnail
* A curiosity-provoking title & premise
* A strong hook which convinces the viewer to put the screen down and let it run
* Editing which delivers the information at an engaging (yet monetizable) pace
* Packaging said information so that it is intelligibly balanced across the mediums (audio/text/video)
* ^^^ Doing this all in a style which still retains enough uniqueness to establish a repeat viewerbase
"The algorithm" is a system for efficiently delivering novel videos with these qualities to the audiences who will most eagerly consume them, which is an essential function for a platform with 2 billion monthly users. For every video on lowest-common-denominator celebrity junk, there's a dozen niche videos tailored to some ravenous subculture or other. Not all magazines are tabloids... but just about anyone can kill time with a tabloid, so that's what leads.
Unlike magazine stands, however, the platform will eventually learn to only show you the thumbnails for videos you'll want to finish watching. It's almost embarassing to share... but here's an example batch of 12 recommendations, almost all of which I'm likely to (eventually) click on and fully watch: https://i.imgur.com/dygfXXb.png
Only to the degree Youtube defines success for a person.
As a form of creative expression, a Youtube video can be successful independent of the analytics.
Sure defining success on your own terms means you need a day job. But defining success on Youtube’s terms treats Youtube as a day job anyway.
One popular channel who commentates on american police body cam footage, replaces the gunshot sounds with animal noises. It's ridiculous. Also no discussion or use of tobacco. Many times I've heard people refer to Adolf Hitler as "bad mustache man" for fear of getting censored or demonetised. One channel that discusses historical firearms, is censoring the 1933-1945 german reichsflag. And so on and so on. It's all so tiresome.
Note that I haven't done any of this myself except for making a couple thumbnails for personal videos. I was curious and watched a YouTube video about thumbnails and why they're important.
The thumbnail, video name and channel name are the only bits of information potential viewers see - if your thumbnail isn't good, they aren't even going to _start_ your video, let alone keep watching it.
Very few of channels I subscribe and watch, such as Forgotten Weapons, Technology Connections, Scott Manley, USCSB, CuriousMarc, media.ccc.de, etc. uses that open mouth YouTube face for their thumbnails, if they display a human face in a thumbnail at all. I would consider Doug Demuro videos to be embarrassingly deep into "typical YouTube stupidity" realm to admit watching, but even he tend to leave his mouth less than fully open.
Do they not engineer their thumbnails to "appease the algorithm" - they do, by showing accurate and intriguing previews of what is to be presented, that for those channels often happens not to be an adult male human face with all orifices articulated to near or past mechanical limits, which, by the way, is an another one of optima.
The statement "one can(not) judge a book by its cover" is not functionally equal to "books dipped longest in fluorescent yellow dye sell the most", at all. Apples and oranges both have their place.
Tracking what you click on versus what you don’t, you might recognize that certain thumbnails make you more likely to take a pass.
For clarity, my experience is at hobby scale and part of that hobby is learning about youtube. Trying to make the line go up is fun (until it isn’t) and a little attention to thumbnails seems to make the line go up.