- MrBeast may have just earned millions of views
that he would've otherwise never had.
And the most interesting part about this is,
he didn't even need to post a new video to do it.
- Yeah, and the method he used for these massive spikes
in viewership was simple and effective.
And in theory, any channel could apply this strategy.
- So we have to give a quick Twitter shout out here
to TheYoutubeBully
who pulled up these four videos from MrBeast
that have recently all undergone some thumbnail updates.
This being one of them from October 12th of 2019.
Rob, look at the graph here on our views per hour chart.
- Yeah it looks pretty stable for at least the year
at this point, getting, well,
maybe just under, just over a thousand views per hour.
And then, whoosh, all of a sudden,
he multiplies the views on this video by a factor of 10.
How do you do that with existing content
that's now over two years old?
- That starts off pretty strong.
However, like most videos on YouTube,
it eventually tapers off
and kind of rides off into the sunset.
And now most creators understand this trend, right?
This is just kind of the natural lifespan
of a YouTube video.
And we all just kind of accept it.
- Yeah, I like to call this viewer intense.
You know, MrBeast has an entertainment focused channel,
and viewers like to see something new and fresh
on a regular basis.
It's not necessarily a solution based channel
giving answer to questions that need to be answered
on YouTube.
So they aren't evergreen.
It's inevitable that every video
has some sort of major drop off after a couple of weeks
maybe a month or two at most even for MrBeast.
- The thing about MrBeast videos though
is that despite them not being super searchable,
they're still evergreen.
So a video about searching dumpsters, for example,
is just as relevant today
as it was the day it was first released.
- And not to mention when these videos first came out,
even for MrBeast, he had a considerably smaller audience
than he does now.
The dodge ball video, for example,
at the time of release, he had only,
I emphasize the word only, 20 million subscribers.
And in terms of channel views, 2 1/2 billion.
But all of that is dwarfed in comparison
to the 90 plus million subscribers he has
and billions more views, six times as many,
which is incredible.
- And so all of this old content that Jimmy, MrBeast has
at his disposal leaves him into this very unique position
because if he just brings the thumbnails
of these older videos up to his more modern standards,
he can reach a whole lot of new viewers.
Because think about it,
if you discover MrBeast here
and you hit subscribe and watch all of his new uploads,
do you click on the thumbnails for older videos
that look like this?
- I mean, maybe done but you do have to admit,
this thumbnail really doesn't look anything
like the type of thumbnails that you see
on Jimmy's channel today.
A newer fan of MrBeast is much more likely to click
on a video if it has that familiar look
and feel that they're already used to.
- Right, so are we saying right now, Rob,
that this is a thing
that every creator watching this needs to go back
through their entire old back catalog of videos
and go through and update every single thumbnail?
- Well, no, I mean, MrBeast does have an army of people
who can help him rebuild thumbnails any time he likes.
And let's be honest, some videos,
including our own just need to go away forever.
They're simply not good enough to be on YouTube.
But we do have some practical tips
that shouldn't be too time consuming
and could give your all the videos a chance
to reach newer audiences.
- So if this is something you're interested in trying,
here's what we suggest you do.
The first step would be to go through your old catalog
of videos and pull out your top performing ones
perhaps of all time if relevant.
And then what I want you to do
is run down the following checklist for each video.
This video is just as relevant today
as it was the first day it was released.
- This video was getting views at one point
but today it's not really doing much at all.
- This video meets all of my I standards for quality today
in terms of production and video length.
- And finally, I have an idea
for how I could update this video's title
and or the thumbnail.
- Now, if you're able to put a tick mark
next to each one of those four points,
we are giving you permission to go through your old content
and then update the thumbnails on those videos.
- However, if even one of those check boxes is difficult
to tick, then we have a slightly different recommendation
- Because it would be more effective for you
to remake the video instead of going through this process.
- If it's not relevant anymore
then obviously changes need to be made to the video itself.
It's too late to revive this particular content.
- If it's getting a healthy number of views,
it's probably best not to touch it.
- And let's be honest,
sometimes if a production value of a video
just isn't up to scratch beat,
polar lighting or even worse, terrible audio.
- And most importantly, if you don't have a good idea
for what the new thumbnail of this video,
for example, could look like,
it's probably not worth the stress.
- This strategy of updating your titles and thumbnails
could work for any kind of channel
but it really does depend on the type of content.
And we do have an additional tool here
that could help you with that.
It's called the Thumbnail Preview Tool.
What it allows you to do is have a look
at the title and thumbnail of your content
and compare it to what's already on YouTube,
be it on a search page, on a homepage,
and even more so before you even publish a video,
you can also use this tool.
- So in the case of this video we're looking at
which is six huge mistakes to avoid on YouTube,
the more recent content in this space,
I would say is giving us
some really interesting inspiration.
One thing you can notice here is human emotion
is a big element
that we we did not include in our thumbnail originally.
So in sharing all of this with you today,
Rob and I aren't sitting here
trying to get you to stress over the older content
on your channel.
However, it might be worth doing for certain videos.
- Yeah, we've just been looking at titles and thumbnails
but there are many other things that you can do
to videos that are already published on your channel
to try and revive them, monitor them, resurrect them.
And you know what?
We've got a video over here, check it out.