This Will Change the Way You Make Thumbnails

Key Takeaways

And if you're not on your agame in a sea of crazy good thumbnails, your thumbnails just aren't going to stand out. And as creators, it is our job to use some of these exact same tactics that companies have been using for years and years, spending over $500 billion a year to get people's attention to watch our videos. But to help this all make sense, I need to show you something. Let's go. And we're in a random parking lot ready to talk about the billboard concept. The billboard concept is simply that YouTube thumbnails are just like billboards on the side of roads. And that's because billboards on the side of roads have two jobs just like thumbnails do. Number one, that's to be noticed. And if nobody notices your thumbnail, of course, they're not going to click on it. And the second thing that they have to do is they have to actually take action and click on your thumbnail. Or in the case of a billboard, they have to go and do the thing the billboard's wanting them to do. The problem is there's something called the highway test. And the highway test is simply that as people are driving down the street, they only have a split second to notice the billboard and then to potentially do something about it. And that is exactly the same on YouTube. If we don't get people to notice our thumbnails and then to take action, we have failed. But the problem is that these companies are paying billions of dollars to specialists to create these billboards to be interesting and to have a good call to action. As creators, we don't have that. But I can guarantee you with the recipe that we're about to show you now, you will be able to create even better thumbnails than they were creating billboards. And for that, Ricky has the recipe. Speaking of recipes, a good thumbnail is like a good tortilla chip. Forgive me, it's almost lunchtime, but I promise this is going to make sense. You see, every day 3.7 million videos are uploaded to YouTube. And if you want to succeed, you have to stand out. Clickthrough rate is one of the two most important factors to success on YouTube. If you can't get people to stop scrolling and click on your thumbnail, you've basically lost the YouTube game. So, without any further ado, let's go talk about what this recipe looks like. So, the first ingredient of a really good thumbnail is to catch people's eye. This is the top of the tortilla chip. And okay, I know the ingredients in tortilla chips are all intermixed entirely. And so, all of the ingredients are in the whole chip, but just bear with me here. The top of the chip matters the most. We have to catch people's attention when they're seeing our thumbnail intermixed with all of the other thumbnails they're going to see on YouTube. Let me show you what I'm talking about. Here's an example home screen on YouTube. I just go there and I see a whole bunch of YouTube videos. I maybe even start scrolling. Which thumbnails catch your eye? For me, it's this one on the right as well as this one in the bottom center. This Mark Robber video. The SNL one kind of but not as much. Those other two stand out the most to me. What about you? Let's look at another one. This Costco one in the upper center actually kind of catches my eye. Mr. Beast knows what he's doing. And that one does too. This camper one over to the right as well. Maybe also this tree in the bottom center. This time lapse, but also not quite as much as some of the others. One more here for here. What stands out to you? It's certainly not this one in the bottom right. Maybe this 20minut timer. This fence kind of. There's some really cool photos, too. Look at this chopper over in the bottom left. That could be really cool looking, but it's not catching my eye. At least not instantaneously. What is it that these thumbnails have in common that make them stand out from the other thumbnails on the homepage? The first element is simplicity. Most of these thumbnails had few or no words. They also didn't use very complex imagery. They kept the focus of the thumbnail very simple. We're going to look at exactly how to do this kind of stuff a little bit later on in the video, but for now, just remember that simplicity over pretty much anything else. Number two, the main subject stands out from the background. Remember that chopper one we just saw on that third homepage? That one, it's a cool photo, but the chopper doesn't stand out from the background. In fact, it blends in way too much with the trees. If we had just made the background a little bit more plain or made the chopper a little bit brighter, did a little bit of a color gradient behind it, something to make that chopper stand out from the background, it would have been substantially more eye-catching. This is not only going to help draw people's eye better, but it's also going to make it really obvious in a split second what's happening in the image, and that's key, too. The third thing is you can use bright colors or use striking imagery, something that makes that thumbnail stand out compared to what else they're going to see on the homepage. Because we can't look at our thumbnails in isolation. Our thumbnails are going to be compared to dozens of other thumbnails as people scroll through YouTube. We have to stop that scroll. And these are the ways that we're going to do it. Again, a lot more detail on the how-to in just a couple minutes. The second ingredient is curiosity. We have to arouse enough curiosity that people are compelled to at least read the title of the video or maybe even click straight through and start watching right away. A thumbnail is a lot like a hook at the very beginning of a video. It should give them a little bit of information, but it should also pose a question in their mind that they now feel compelled to get answered by watching the video. Most people think that you need to be clear about what the video is about in the title, but especially in the thumbnail. You don't. All you need to do is catch their attention and then arouse enough curiosity that they feel compelled to click on the video. Now, something to keep in mind. It's also most important that this thumbnail be irresistible for your target audience to click on. It's more valuable for you that your video gets clicked and watched by your target audience than that it gets clicked on and viewed by a million people. If the content of the video isn't a good fit, well, then you're going to get poor engagement, short watch times, and your video will stop spreading no matter how clickable your thumbnail is. This is where that big tortilla chip of the entire YouTube process comes into play. Yes, it's important that we get the click, but after the click, if we don't get that watch time and that engagement, it doesn't matter how good your thumbnails are. That's a topic for another video, so we'll just leave it at that. So, for the sake of thumbnails though, the imagery that we use and the type of curiosity that we create with the imagery in our thumbnail needs to be particularly appealing to the people that are most likely to enjoy your video. Gosh, there's so much to do here. And so, you're just going to have to trust me that we're going to dive into the how-to of all of this in just a minute. But to help with curiosity, I want to share with you five specific curiosity types that you can use. And this will help at least get those creative juices flowing. The first curiosity type we'll talk about is proof. In this case, what you're doing is you're questioning something that most people in your audience likely believe. And you're suggesting that in this video, you're going to prove that what they believe is not true. Let me show you an example here. What is he proving? To me, when I just see this thumbnail, it's obvious that first of all, he just got this YouTube channel to at least 100,000 subscribers, which again, the title is going to help answer that, but just instantaneously. And he's got other YouTube plaques there. So, I mean, he's been very successful you with YouTube, and the few words that take up a very small portion of the thumbnail are making it clear to me that he did it again. That makes me curious, how did he do it again? Because what's a belief that a lot of people who are trying to do YouTube have? They believe that it's total luck or that it's just really difficult or almost impossible to get a new channel monetized or get a new channel especially to the level of 100,000 subscribers so they can get a play button. He's challenging that belief and proving it all in an image. And you can see that in a split second. The next curiosity type we'll talk about is we call this sort of the weird or the intrigue type thumbnail. It's just something a little bit kind of weird. An example here is this one. This isn't from Mr. Beast's channel, but it features Mr. Beast and then it has those couple of words, a mistake, even with a question mark. Mistake, right? With the weird or the intrigue. Essentially, what we want is we want sometimes it's going to have something that's kind of blurred on the screen so it's hard to tell what it is. You'll see that a lot with people showing numbers or a graph and there's something kind of blurred out or maybe there's something kind of hidden or just something that evokes the feeling of what is this? What's the mistake? This is on a channel called Food Theory. So something about the feastable specifically. What is it? And that creates substantial curiosity. This kind of intrigue is something you're going to use a ton in thumbnails. I don't actually know what the video is really about just by looking at the thumbnail, but I know I have a question in my mind. All right, next we'll talk about the solution curiosity type. I have a solution to your problem. You want to get to 4,000 hours of watch time on your YouTube channel, and I know how to get there. Gosh, that's a good looking thumbnail. Essentially, all we're doing here is there's a problem that my viewer cares about, and I'm going to show in a simple image, in a split second, that I have the solution to their problem. Again, this is not a thumbnail that would appeal to a super broad, wide YouTube audience. It's a solution to a problem that's specific to my target audience. Keep that in mind. All right. Next is the transformation or comparison. This I've seen this thumbnail pop up over and over and over again. It is beautiful. What's the transformation? The fire pit used to be smoky. Now it's not. And we see a before and after with a split screen. This is like pure gold. They've done basically everything right in this thumbnail, which again we'll talk about here in just a minute. In this case though, what is the curiosity gap? I'm seeing like I know exactly what this video is about. You're going to show me how you got the smoke to go away for your fire pit. That seems pretty simple and straightforward. However, what the curiosity gap is here is how you went from this to this. That's a change I would like to experience. I don't want my fire pit to be super smoky. I need to see how you did that so that I can experience the same thing. That's the curiosity gap. The last curiosity type we'll talk about here, although really you could break these down into more and you could say that there are 30 different curiosity gap types, but let's talk about this one. The last one is the challenge. this video and all challenge type videos or challenge type curiosity gaps I should say they contain some sort of a challenge. In this case, can his robot solve a puzzle? Now, here he's basically showing that it did. But the curiosity gap here is there's a challenge taking place. I need to see if they succeeded in the challenge. Usually people do because they wouldn't post the video if they totally failed. But I still want to see that they succeeded. And I want to see the journey to how they achieved that success. Now, the third piece of the thumbnail recipe is actually not the thumbnail. The third piece is the title. You see, the packaging, the marketing for your YouTube video is thumbnail and title. And these need to go together. So, what the title needs to do is it needs to support the curiosity gap that's presented by the thumbnail. This should further entice potential viewers to actually click into the video so that they can satiate that curiosity. Again, we're going to have to talk about titles in another video because that is another big can of worms. Probably shouldn't be talking about worms in a recipe video. Now, all of these ingredients are important. Curiosity gap is going to drive the click. But if we don't have those ingredients from the top part of the chip, stopping the scroll, catching their eye long enough for them to have that one or two seconds to evoke that curiosity, then all the curiosity gap in the world doesn't matter. So, we're going to need to talk more about design elements and how we're going to make not only this curiosity gap take place, but also how to make your thumbnails eyepopping so that they stop that scroll. And for that, we're going to go to Julia. I would argue that the design elements of putting together a thumbnail is one of the most frustrating parts. And here's why. For most of us, there is a big gap between our ability and our taste. So, we can look at a thumbnail of ours and a professional thumbnail, and we can clearly tell that theirs is better, but we don't quite know why. And often this isn't even a matter of lacking the technical skills in Photoshop or Canva or whatever you're using. Sometimes you just don't know which element. So I'm going to help you fill that gap so that your thumbnails live up to your taste and also show you a couple of these technical skills that are really quick and easy to apply. Won't take a lot of time. This is an easy process. I promise you can do it. And I'm going to teach you mostly through examples. And that leads me to a disclaimer, which is that there are always exceptions to these rules. And the better you get at thumbnails, the more you know what the rules are and you're able to break the rules on occasion and it still works. But for the most part, especially if you're a beginner, try to stick to these rules because they're going to work out better for you 80 or 90% of the time. I hope you're already thinking about how you can apply a lot of these principles to your own thumbnails. But if you still feel stuck, like, well, my niche is different. I just can't figure out how I would actually do this with the video I'm about to make or the video I've already made, then we want to invite you to join us on a live. And if you comment below for this video and comment your channel name and maybe even some specific thumbnails you want us to look at, then we will do a live review in a couple hours. We are going live in 2 hours is the time of this video published at 9:00 a.m. Mountain Standard Time to review your thumbnails. And if you comment below ahead of time, you are going to be first in line to get your thumbnail reviewed. If you're actually on the live, too, you have to be up. All right, so let's start with a little game. Let's look at these videos. I'm blurring the titles. And tell me if you know what the whole video is about. I'm just proving a point really quick here. You don't. Yeah, these videos are getting millions of views. And if you go to your homepage, especially if you look at bigger channels, you'll see that over and over again, they are not explaining even half of the video, but you're still intrigued enough to read the title and then click the video to find out what the video is about. And that's a mistake that a lot of beginners make. They try to put too much into the thumbnail and explain the entire story when really you just need to get them to click. So Colin Samir did this really well, and I'm going to show you. It's interesting. I didn't realize this until I started downloading these thumbnails for this video. The $120 million gamble. This is a very long video. They could have focused on a lot of different aspects that were in this video, but they chose to focus on only one, only the most interesting thing or what they thought was the most interesting thing. And here's what's actually interesting. They actually had different versions of this before. So, this was actually the first version. This is the second version. It's similar. They raised 120 million, but a little bit different. And they're still focusing on one thing. They're focusing on how they actually raised 120 million rather than how they gambled 120 million. And then they changed it a third time, but still to only one core concept, which was money ruined esports. That's completely different. And I'm sure all of these things were covered in this video, but Colin and Samir are advanced in YouTube enough to know that you can only really sell one aspect of the video at a time. So for you, that means to design a good thumbnail, you have to decide first what is the most interesting or intriguing aspect of that video and figure out how you can convey that in a very simple thumbnail and then we can start putting together the pieces. So let's look at this one by Mark Robber. Now, I think it's pretty obvious what the main subject of this thumbnail is. It is the baseball right here. Now, Mark Rober is in it. There's also a baseball field, but the main subject is clearly positioned to be this really interesting looking baseball contraption. Now, most amateur YouTubers would have held a baseball next to them and had a little picture like this. So, the baseball doesn't really stand out. Then, they would need text and an arrow to explain what's going on with the baseball because you can't actually see it. But Mark holds the baseball up and I'm sure enhances a million ways. In fact, the actual baseball in this video looks nothing like this, but he knows that you have to make it look interesting for the thumbnail. And then he blurred himself. You can still recognize him, which is important, especially for a channel as big as his where he has a huge fan base wanting to watch videos of him, but he's blurred out so that he doesn't distract from the baseball and the main subject can really stand out when the background is more simple. So, for most thumbnails, you want to have a really obvious subject and you want to make sure everything else is not distracting from that. You also want really good lighting and you want your subject to be really clear. The lighting doesn't have to be perfect on the background most cases, but the subject needs to be very well lit, very easy to see. He also used a very clean and uncluttered background. It's a baseball field, but there's no audience. Like, he could have had a huge audience on the baseball field to make it look like they all want to see what this contraption is, right? He knows that it's better to keep it simple so you can more clearly see the subject and it doesn't distract from that. And he also blurred it. So now I'm going to show you a couple really simple ways of how you can make the subject on your thumbnails stand out so that your taste and your knowledge and your technical skills can all match up. So here's one way is having an outline. Now he has himself completely outlined and so he really stands out from this background and he also blurred the background. The background I will tell you because I know from the video is very interesting and it would be tempting to show that whole background so that people can see what it is and what they're going to get from the video. You put all this work into it. like want people to see it, but they will if they click, and they won't if you don't make the background more simple. Here's another quick technique for how you can make a person or another object stand out so that it doesn't blend into the background. It doesn't look flat. It almost pops out a little bit. Now, this is subtle, but there's a little bit of a white drop shadow and it looks more professional. Ricky is also very brightly lit, and the background is one solid color. The room he took this picture in has a wooden wall behind him, which is not even that complicated, but it's a little bit more complex than green, and so it would distract more from the other really important elements in this thumbnail. Notice again, we don't know what this video is about probably. I mean, I don't think you could guess. You might be able to guess. Let me know in the comments if you guessed it without seeing the title, but it just looks good enough that people are going to read the title and then they'll probably click. Same with this one. What is it about? I don't know. Here's one more example of how Ryan Shrehan made himself stand out from the background. So he didn't really add a drop shadow, but he has the brightest part of the background image right behind him. So it kind of adds a backlight. So you can do that by adding backlights when you take your thumbnail or by doing something in post to make what's behind you almost a little halo effect. Okay, I really want to show you this example because this is about a video game and that feels different, right? You're like, well, I want to show the video game. I can't just take this picture all on my own, have a subject different from the background. But here's what he did. So he had this screenshot from the game and there was no glow background to Link and there was no glow background to his character. And so he added those two things and this he completely added over the screenshot of the game. This is a little avatar of the creator who made this video and then he added this glow around link so it pops more than it would have otherwise. And that's a really good trick if you're doing like a video game or something. You can still have Canva or whatever platform you're using, cut out different elements, and then you can make 3D layers out of it, even if you don't have all of the separate elements to begin with. Layering objects is such a big part of thumbnail design, and it's really simple once you learn to do it. And there's so many little techniques and effects you can add once you start breaking up the layers of the subject, the background, or other objects. Another important thing you can do is resize these layers. So, I know this might seem obvious, but maybe you've never really thought to do it on your own thumbnails. So, with this, is the penny that size compared to his head? Or did he find a giant penny to take this picture? No. He got a regular picture of a Penny or whoever made the thumbnail did, and they blew it up really big. And so, that's the magic of taking different elements and playing with them individually. There are a couple other things really great about this thumbnail, and then a really fun secret. So, one is the color palette. There are only about three colors, which makes a really minimal, impactful color palette. I would almost say this Penny and his skin are like the same color, right? and maybe they added saturation or changed the tone of the penny or his skin or both so that they would be more similar. And because you only have these three essential colors, it really really makes the thumbnail pop and not be too over complicated. Let's go back to Mark Robber's video. There's a pretty clear color palette here, too. We've got the white on his hat and the baseball. And those are pretty matched. Those might have been edited to match a little bit more. And then you have the red inside the baseball, the red on the thread of the baseball, and the red in a sweatshirt. And then you have the green of field and the black of the background and the black of a sweatshirt. And I guess you could say this little baseball dirt and his skin are a similar color. You don't have to be exact on how many colors there are, but the point is that there are only a few that are really standing out, working together, and that makes for a very aesthetically pleasing thumbnail. That is such a big part of design. Another thing is all of this negative space. So, a lot of amateur thumbnail designers, I've done this myself, you try to fit so many things on the thumbnail because you want to explain a lot and you almost feel like you should fill up the whole thumbnail like, "Oh, I could fit something else interesting here, explain more here." Don't do it. If you can keep it minimal, keep it minimal. This negative space really makes it pop on the home screen next to all these other busy thumbnails. Okay, now a fun secret about this. If you don't know, this is one of the most like famous videos on YouTube. This blew Ryan Tran up completely, his penny series. But about seven years ago, I noticed he did another kind of penny type video where he was trying to turn a penny into $100, $1,000, I can't remember. And so this was like his amateur thumbnail. And the text is nice and simple. That's good. Cursive is bad. A lot of people use cursive when they start. Don't use cursive in your thumbnails unless you're a calligraphy channel and then still probably don't use cursive in your thumbnails. There's a reason cursive isn't on billboards very often because like Nathan said, people need to be able to see it in a split second. I just think the difference between these two thumbnails of Ryan getting way better at YouTube is super interesting. Okay, another aspect to simplicity and this is important because simplicity is one of the most important things. Made a whole video about that if you want to watch it. But another aspect is using fewer words. So you not only want to reduce the number of elements on a thumbnail, you also want to reduce the number of words. This is really interesting. So these are actually two completely different videos by Ali Abdal. He made them in a similar time frame and obviously it's like the same picture he used. So he's showing before and after and he's also explaining before and after which is not bad. Um so here's another version of it where he just used icons. So for your own thumbnails, think of ways you can show don't tell. You've probably heard that before with storyw writing. It's also true with thumbnails. If you can show it somehow rather than putting it in words, especially if it allows you to to reduce the number of words or maybe bring the number of words to zero, that can help a lot. Two words on a thumbnail is really fine. Anywhere from three to five is usually okay, but less is often better, especially because it'll give you more creative ideas when you are tasked with trying to figure out how to explain the same idea without words. And then even if you decide to have the words, you've still got a good foundation in addition to the words that kind of help sell the words even more instead of just relying on the words. Like for this one, if Ally had been trying to figure out how do I show before and after sleeping transformation, even if you don't have the words, I think that's pretty obvious what's going on there. He's sleeping better and he feels better about it. And you'll see in a lot of these great thumbnails, there's just not a ton of words. That's a surefire way to see how new someone is at YouTube is usually how many words they have on a thumbnail. That's an easy fix, a good thing. Okay, here's another concept of using mystery and intrigue. So, I feel like especially on old YouTube, we used to see so many things blurred out where it'd be like an arrow pointing to something blurred out. And that can still work, but you see it less often. And I really like the way Michelle Carr creates mystery without blurring anything out. She creates part of this visual picture. She's in army clothes, but she's looking at something offcreen, off of the thumbnail, which makes you wonder, maybe even subconsciously, what is she looking at? So, she doesn't have to blur something to make you wonder that. Again, she's doing it here. It looks like something exciting is happening. Nothing crazy is happening in the thumbnail. I mean, the president's there, so that's kind of crazy, but it almost looks like there's danger. By the way, she's looking nervously offcreen, even though she's not showing another thing. So, again, keeping the thumbnail simple, there's not too many elements, creating mystery and intrigue so that you're curious to know what's going on, and you're more likely to read the title and hopefully click. Okay, before and after. So, Ollie is doing before and after. Here, he calls it out. Here, he doesn't call it out. So, sometimes you get across the message of before and after, the journey. You only need to show the before or the after because people will kind of automatically fill in the blanks. Especially if your before or your after picture is really dramatic. And a lot of videos are before or after. Like this video is very clearly before and after. Before this fire pits like this, after the fire pits like this, they made some kind of change. But with a lot of videos, they have a before and after element. There is some kind of transformation or some kind of journey, even if it isn't this obvious like DIY before and after. So, think about how you can convey that message in your thumbnail. Even if that first glance, you don't feel like you have a before and after type of video. I like that he has this thick border, and that's super easy to do in Canva. And you could even change the colors of it or put it at an angle. And then this side's super saturated, so it feels really nice. And this side is that kind of frustrating smoky campfire that we're all familiar with. Again, color scheme, super simple. We got white, green, kind of the brick, and then the flames. And a lot of before and afters can go from dull to vibrant or you could have warm and cool colors. Just some way to show some contrast or juxtaposition. All right. So, if you really want to make this happen and make sure you understand these concepts and how they can apply to your niche, then join us for that live at 9:00 a.m. Mountain Standard Time. Comment below with your channel and your thumbnails so that we know which ones to review during the live and we will see you in the live. And if you don't have time to comment before we start the live, just show up anyways because we might still have time to get to your thumbnails. If you're actually on the live, too, you have to be a vote. See you there.