I would generally suggest using thumbnails that don’t provoke clicking through annoyance. Anything involving heavily edited human faces, stupid expressions, text that could be inferred from the title, or the classic huge red arrows, is in my opinion either trying to appeal to children or get people annoyed enough to click to see what the video is about.
Source - have spent way, way too much time on YouTube. PS do yourself a favour and install dearrow.
This is true, but it doesn’t change the facts that the channels with good content, which is highly subjective, also want to maximise the viewership.
Think of it like this, there is a subset of people that will click the video based on whether the title seems interesting and don’t care about the thumbnail; these people are always going to click. Then there is a subset who need these kind of thumbnails to drive clicks to their channel.
You can go and find countless YouTubers discussing this topic and how it really does affect the metrics of the channel. Do I like these thumbnails? Not really. Do they annoy me in anyway ? Not really. I care about the content and everything else is just superficial noise.
I would generally suggest using thumbnails that don’t provoke clicking through annoyance. Anything involving heavily edited human faces, stupid expressions, text that could be inferred from the title, or the classic huge red arrows, is in my opinion either trying to appeal to children or get people annoyed enough to click to see what the video is about.
Source - have spent way, way too much time on YouTube. PS do yourself a favour and install dearrow.
YouTubers seem to experiment with thumbnails and the fact is that more people click these type of thumbnails compared to more traditional ones.
Mr Beast gets lots of views, yet it could be argued all of his content is garbage - getting views is not at all an indicator of quality.
This is true, but it doesn’t change the facts that the channels with good content, which is highly subjective, also want to maximise the viewership.
Think of it like this, there is a subset of people that will click the video based on whether the title seems interesting and don’t care about the thumbnail; these people are always going to click. Then there is a subset who need these kind of thumbnails to drive clicks to their channel.
You can go and find countless YouTubers discussing this topic and how it really does affect the metrics of the channel. Do I like these thumbnails? Not really. Do they annoy me in anyway ? Not really. I care about the content and everything else is just superficial noise.