YouTubers like MrBeast
and The Sidemen are taking their old videos
and updating the thumbnails in an attempt
to get more views.
But this has got me thinking, "Does this actually work?"
Now I've changed my thumbnails before.
For example, this recent video
after publishing, I thought maybe my face
and the play button were a bit dark
so I updated it to this.
Definitely a little bit better.
And one of my most famous videos,
the MrBeast space video,
this is the current thumbnail,
but originally, I had a little astronaut Jack
floating about, but a couple of hours
after releasing the video, I thought,
"Why the hell have I done that?
Get out of here!"
But yes, anytime I've updated a thumbnail,
it's always been within the first couple of days
of that video being released.
I've never gone back years later
like I'm going to do today.
So I've selected a bunch of my old videos
with questionable thumbnails
and I'm gonna go through
and optimise those thumbnails starting
with this monstrosity.
This is a video where I received
my JackSucksAtLife 1 million subscriber play button,
so it should have been a pretty big deal
on my channel and we put quite a bit of effort into it.
We even recorded a little weird montage
at B&Q car park with the play button.
- ♪ Yeah, right ♪
♪ That's a deal, right? ♪
- But that video three years on, only has 264,000 views,
which is way lower than my average play button video.
And I can't help thinking
that this thumbnail is partly responsible.
It is just ugly, let's be honest.
There is too much going on there.
So some of these thumbnails,
I'm only gonna tweak certain things.
This one, I'm just starting from scratch.
But firstly, we need to check how this video's
currently doing, so we can compare later.
So in the last 28 days, it has received 322 views.
It's got me one extra subscriber and even 58 pence.
So I should have a suitable picture to start.
And that is this one here.
Originally, this was taken from my YouTooz news episode,
but I should be able to Photoshop a gold play button
in here and it'll work.
So I'm gonna go ahead and remove the background.
There we go, let's get the big lad into position.
Now these days, most of my thumbnails
have a background like this one
to match my blue colours behind me.
But when this particular video was released,
my background was more this kind of colour,
which isn't as nice, but if we crank up the vibrance,
it might make it look, oh, a bit too much.
Yeah, you know what, why not?
I'm aware it still looks weird, but bear with me.
Now, I'm just gonna make myself look less washed out.
Yeah, that looks okay.
And now, we need to do the difficult bit,
which is shove a gold play button here.
Now I have a picture of my gold play button,
but I am in the background, so we'll need to sort that out.
Some may say it would've been easier
to just take a picture of myself with the gold play button,
but I'm clearly in too deep now.
Just need to cut around my fingers and now watch this.
Wow, it's like magic. (bold flute music)
(chuckles) I'm gonna clean everything up
so it looks great, don't worry.
I am also aware that it's a continuity error
that I'm wearing glasses
because I did not have glasses when this video came out.
But if anything, that should just create more intrigue
and therefore, give us the extra views that I so crave.
I'm gonna make this even more gold-y.
Ooh, it's going kind of green, maybe I need to calm down.
Oh yeah, there it is.
Let's just take away some of that green, yeah.
Next, I need to remove myself from the reflection.
The way I normally do this is, I grab another portion
of the play button and I just put it behind it
and then add a shadow to the diamond
and it always ends up looking quite nice.
Turn up the vibrance a bit there, yay, (chuckles), yes.
I think adding a shadow to the whole play button
will probably look quite nice.
And then I'm just doing a manual shadow under my hands
to make that look real.
Same thing to this one, lovely.
No JackSucksAtLife thumbnail's ever complete
without a pointless arrow.
And before you know it, you've got a thumbnail,
which is much better than this one.
I'm not claiming that this is anything revolutionary,
but it is definitely an improvement compared
to the original.
So let's upload the new one, there it is.
And we click save,
and we see how it does in a month's time.
Now, next, I wanna test a hypothesis
and that is MrBeast tweeting out
that since closing his mouth in his thumbnails,
his views have gone up.
Now this is really weird, but I've got a great opportunity
to test it with one of my most popular videos ever.
Now, as I said, I have tweaked this thumbnail before.
Originally, it looked like this
and even for about an hour, I simplified it even more
to look like this.
But I think it definitely makes more sense,
having Jimmy in the thumbnail.
But let's close his mouth (laughs).
So this is the thumbnail
where I got the face from originally,
but now his mouth is closed.
Now I've still got the original Photoshop file,
so I should be able to just slide this face out
and then bring in the new one (laughs).
Oh, I think I lined the blur up perfectly with his beard,
so I'm gonna have to redo it all.
Okay, there we go.
I'm actually really interested
to see how this one's impacted.
So as we know, the video has had 7.4 million views in total,
but in the last 28 days, it has had 241,000.
So let's upload the new thumbnail
and we could see what happens.
I'm really interested in this one.
All right, next video
is my "Can we get an emoji on a play button" video.
Which as you can see, 2 million views, it did well!
But perhaps there's more potential to unlock.
This is the current thumbnail,
but interestingly, it isn't the original
and I'd just forgotten that I had altered it slightly.
So this is what it looked like, originally, ooh.
So spoiler alert, I did manage
to get an emoji on a play button.
As you can see, it's this cute little globe.
So I put the matching globe on the play button,
but then I realised, a globe emoji
is ironically, not as globally recognised
as an emoji compared to something like the heart
or the laughing emoji.
So I changed it to a laughing emoji,
which I do think works better.
However, when you zoom out,
it's all just quite light-colored.
So I am gonna change it
to a fire emoji. (bold rock music)
Oh, this will surely look way more striking.
Now I didn't save the original Photoshop file,
so we'll just do a little bit of this, there we go,
very nice, and now, I just need
to get the fire emoji into place.
Try and change the angle on it, slightly, yes.
Now with the laughing emoji,
I kind of whacked up the brightness a bit
so it looked more real.
But this time, I think I'm gonna leave it like that.
I want it to stand out, I think that stands out better.
So let's get it updated, save.
For reference, currently, this video has had 21,000 views
in the last 28 days.
Okay, I've now gone ahead and done three more thumbnails
for three quite similar videos.
The first one was a video talking
about the most liked comments on YouTube
and Dream was very popular when this originally released.
And as he has a comment with over a million likes,
he made it into the thumbnail.
Also, why is it so yellow, Jack?
It's a very gross shade of yellow too.
I don't know what happened there.
So I've modernised it a lot.
The thumbnail now looks like this.
We've got modern glasses-wearing Jack
and I thought I'd create a bit of intrigue
with a mystery comment from one of the YouTube founders.
The video did well at the time,
but right now, it's had only 5,000 views
in the last 28 days.
So it's definitely time to get this updated, save.
Next, I did a video, talking about the biggest YouTubers
that have ever commented on one of my videos.
And once again, Dream and the disgusting shade
of yellow, make it into the thumbnail.
Dream's one of my subscribers, so that's why he made it in.
But now, I've changed it to something much juicier.
Ooh, MrBeast has commented on my videos before,
but I will be honest, he did not comment sub 4 sub
nine years ago, but the viewers don't need to know that.
Also, it's only got six likes
that creates even more intrigue.
I'd be clicking on this if I saw this in my suggested.
This video is performing even more poorly
with only 1,800 views in the last 28 days.
So I do think this new thumbnail will have a good chance
of making a difference.
And finally, I did a video talking
about my most liked comments.
Yes, I know these are all very similar videos, okay.
But they were spread out over a long time.
But anyway, this was the thumbnail and it's yellow.
It's a nicer shade of yellow, but it's still very yellow.
Jack, what you doing with all the yellow?
What's the yellow for, Jack?
These days, I actually do have the 30th most liked comment
on YouTube, so let's take a look at the new thumbnail.
This time, I decided to keep the face,
but I've just made everything else much easier to see
and I've got the new profile picture.
I've got an accurate number of likes, some modern blue,
maybe, actually, I'll whack up the contrast a bit.
Yeah, there we go.
This video did pretty good at the time,
but currently, it's only getting 4,000 views a month.
So let's get the thumbnail updated.
That is now six classic videos
with brand-spanking new thumbnails.
I'm very excited to see what happens.
So we're gonna give it a month
and hopefully, in 28 days' time, the rate
at which these videos are getting views,
will have increased tremendously.
(drums)
All right, who wants to find out if the rate
at which these videos are getting views,
has increased tremendously?
I know I do.
I've gathered all of the data
and what if I told you
that one of the videos has received a 900% increase
in views, but I've also had a bunch of stinkers,
so we'll go through the stinkers first.
Starting with my most liked comment video.
So this was the original thumbnail and this is the new one.
So this time a month ago,
the video had 4,700 views in the last 28 days.
And 28 days later, with the new thumbnail,
it's about the same 4,500 views.
But you will see, take a look at the original stats,
it says 46% less than the previous, previous 28 days,
whereas now, the increase is only 5% less.
So potentially, you could argue
that this two-year-old video
that is slowly getting less
and less views each month,
since updating the new thumbnail,
we've slightly slowed down the rate
at which this video is slowing down (laughs).
So I'll take that as a win (laughs).
Next, we did the video
about the most liked comments on all of YouTube,
so this is the original thumbnail
and this is my updated one.
The updated one is definitely better in my opinion.
This time a month ago, we were getting 5,700 monthly views
and in the last 28 days,
it's had even less, 4,400. (sad music)
(Jack chuckling)
But just like the previous one,
we've slowed down the rate at which it's slowing down.
It went from a pretty big 72% to just 23%.
So we're still doing stuff, these are old videos.
It's well over two years old, okay?
I think that we had a very small impact,
but so far, changing thumbnails has proved not
to be worth it, so far.
Now let's move on to a bigger video, something
that's still getting hundreds of thousands of monthly views.
It is of course, our closed-mouth experiment,
the MrBeast space video.
A month ago, this video received 241,000 views
in the last 28 days,
which was 56% less than the previous 28 days,
which is two months ago now.
And now with an open mouth, (drum roll)
it's gone down again (laughs). (sad music)
All three of my new thumbnails have received less views
than the previous month.
But once again, we've gone from 58% less to just 14% less.
So I think we're having an impact,
but we're only having so much of an impact.
Basically, it's the same as taking a bag of flour
and pouring it upside down
and all the flour falls everywhere.
What I've done is, I've taken a bag of flour,
but I've put a sieve there
and then I've tipped it all upside down.
The flour's all still ended up at the bottom,
but it took slightly longer to get there.
Does that make any sense?
I'm not sure (laughs).
Now, interestingly, after I recorded the first bit
of this video, I decided I'd close another MrBeast mouth.
So I took my hiding in thumbnails video
and changed the thumbnail to this.
This is where things turned around for me
because a month ago, this was the stats on this video, 68K,
lots of down arrows,
but now, a month later,
with a closed mouth, 83K, up arrow, up arrow,
still a down arrow on that one, actually.
But up arrows everywhere else,
we've had our first increase!
Changing a thumbnail has actually given me more views
than if I hadn't changed the thumbnail.
And it does not end there,
'cause remember the first thumbnail
that I changed, this terrible, ugly thumbnail
from, like, four years ago?
Well, back then, this video was getting a measly
300 views per month.
And since changing it to this slightly better thumbnail,
which is still not great, but at least it's better,
I am now getting, whoa, 500 views in the last 28 days.
Which yes, that's not many views, but it is a 75% increase.
So if you imagine that on a large scale,
that's gonna have a big impact.
Was it worth the 15 minutes I spent photoshopping
that new thumbnail to get 93 pence?
I'm not sure it was.
But anyway, it does not end there
because next, we did a subtle change to my emoji video.
You can see I changed the emoji to a nicer looking flame.
Last month, we had nothing but down arrows.
This video was slowing down, 21K in the last 28 days,
with a 73% decrease.
Very sad, but since doing a tiny change
which took me just a couple of minutes,
we now have two big up arrows
and a lovely little tick,
that is a 21% increase on the previous 28 days.
I will take it, that is very encouraging to see
and I think that was the right move.
All right, it is finally time for our final thumbnail
and this is my biggest success story.
So this was
the, "Who's the biggest YouTuber to comment
on one of my videos," this was the original thumbnail
and this is the new one, much jazzier, very promising.
A month ago, this video was getting
just 1,800 views per month.
We got lots of down arrows, (sad music)
lots of sad statistics,
but now, here we are a month later
with just a thumbnail change, 18,900 views,
which represents a 978% increase.
You can see by the stats
that there is no sign of this slowing down.
This could be an extra thousand views a day for me
for the foreseeable future.
We've had a over 1,000% increase in subscribers.
Our watch time's got up.
I've made 66 quid!
Last month, I was making six pounds, 99.
Who knew that adding MrBeast to thumbnails gives you views?
I sure didn't, I've never done that.
That's news to me for sure.
Hi guys, quick update, since Becky started editing,
this video has popped off even more.
Look at that spike!
It got 18,000 views just yesterday,
which is equal to the 18,000 views it got in the last month
when I recorded the segment
you've just watched, absolutely crazy.
So what have we learned here?
Does changing thumbnails, potentially give you more views?
Yes, absolutely.
Every single video in this experiment
has either gained more views
than it did in the previous month,
or it has at least slowed down the rate
at which it is slowing down on gaining views,
which I understand is difficult to understand.
Now, could we have had even more success?
Absolutely, I'm not that great at making thumbnails.
I think there are a lots of people out there
that would've been able to do a better job at this
and potentially, I need to hire some of them.
We also could have changed titles,
which I didn't touch at all.
But I think going forward,
this is definitely something I'm gonna look into more.
So thank you very much for watching.
Hopefully, you enjoyed this experiment.
What do you wanna see me trial next?
Let me know in the comments and I will see you all later.