Had a talk with my 14 year old nephew about viral videos

He told me my thumbnails look like they're from 2018 and nobody clicks that style anymore. Showed me his own channel that got 50k views in a week on a video about sorting Lego minifigures. Made me realize I've been ignoring what the algorithm actually rewards now.

3 comments

3 Comments

evan_green524d ago

That bit about your thumbnails looking like they're from 2018 really stuck with me. Did he walk you through exactly what makes his thumbnails work better for the current algorithm?

knight.felix4d ago

Wait, 2018? That's a five year old thumbnail style in internet years. He actually pulled up old videos and showed me how my thumbnails had that faded, compressed look from 2018 with the thin white borders and the too-dark shadows over everything. Said modern algorithm prefers high contrast, punchy colors with basically no shadow overlays on faces. He pointed out how my clickthrough rate was probably getting killed because on mobile thumbnails that looked like 720p uploads next to everyone else's 4K style shots. Kind of hurt but he wasn't wrong.

angela5874d ago

Jumped right into it with my buddy who runs a decent sized channel. He pulled up my analytics and showed me how thumbnails with bright backgrounds and a single subject (like a close-up face) were pulling 2-3x my usual CTR. Told me to ditch any gradient overlays or text that takes up more than 10% of the image. Started using a free tool to boost contrast and saturation by about 20% and my latest video actually did better than his, which felt pretty good not gonna lie.