one of the most important aspects to whether or not your video is going to appear in search
results or just generally in the youtube algorithm is your ctr otherwise known as your click-through
rate which means you need a killer thumbnail in order to get people to click your video and
boost that ctr that's why today we're going to look at your thumbnails you submitted to
us and give you feedback about how you can make them more clickable for your audience let's go
hey i'm Eljay with streamscheme.com i'm also a variety streamer over at twitch.tv/eljayem_
there are links to both those in the description i'd really appreciate it if you felt like checking
me out while i'm live we're gonna go through and give you guys feedback on your thumbnails
you submitted and at the end of this i'm gonna completely rebuild one of your thumbnails from
scratch will it be yours stay tuned in all seriousness though the surprising part of this
video that i didn't expect that i really don't think you guys will expect is the fact that when
we rebuild this person's thumbnail at the end it is so much easier and simpler to make a clickable
thumbnail than what the majority of you guys are actually doing it seems like you guys are
really over complicating it so hopefully if you watch to the end you'll understand what i mean
i've said the word thumbnail already too much that it's lost all meaning so let's get into it
and by getting into it i mean get into our sponsor of today's video skillshare i'm sure you guys know
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and in the top comment alongside the time codes for this video so feel free to skip ahead to any
section you want straight out of the gate you need to think about your audience or if you don't have
an audience set you need to think about your key demographic now you need to also consider what
your audience or key demographic are going to want to watch and what you can do to make them click on
your videos let me give you an example nerd or die asked me to review one of their thumbnails when i
put these submissions out and my first thought was oh god i can't roast a brand and then i
thought actually this is really well made they've done a fantastic job at making this look great
and then my third thought was yeah this isn't very good it doesn't have much intent behind it
i really like you guys but you could have done so much better i think the thumbnail looks fantastic
but let's talk about intent first we have to ask who is nerdodye's key demographic or who is their
audience well it's streamers much like everyone watching this video so what do streamers want to
do what does every single streamer want they want to grow they want to grow their brand they want to
grow their viewership and they want to grow their socials so if everyone wants to grow we need to
use that to our advantage it just says social pop-ups in the thumbnail but if we had it say
grow your socials in big letters with maybe an arrow pointing down we take this phone make it a
bit bigger we point out one pop-up instead it will tell the story of the video and explain the tool
if you click this video you're going to learn about a tool that is going to help you grow
your social media as a streamer that is what we want to push these people because right now it's
kind of just explaining it's a video about social pop-ups there's no intent they're not going to get
anything out of it which means the only people clicking it are people who already are looking
for social pop-ups my actionable tip here is that sometimes beauty doesn't mean it's going
to be the best thumbnail a lot of my thumbnails graphic design wise suck but because they heavily
appeal to their key demographic they work and they perform so think about your user's intent and then
think about what you can do to boost that intent i hope that helps and i'm sorry no that i don't mean
to be harsh but you guys asked next up a tip that i think every single person watching this should
have heard me say before in my other videos and that is that youtube thumbnails are much smaller
when you upload them than when you're actually editing them on your big screen if we look at
this thumbnail by benjalin i've just butchered your name then you can see exactly what i mean i
think the concept is really good and can become a really solid thumbnail that intrigues people
except we need to refine it a bit but this really hammers home my point about how any small elements
in thumbnails just become useless when you shrink it down you see the text becomes almost impossible
to read so we grab this businessman beta let's make him a bit bigger more prominent ditch all
this text that is impossible to read because it's so small and then it gets even harder with the
yellow text blending into the background let's make the stonks larger and i believe at the time
of uploading this it was the world record for the game which is a huge hook that isn't being used
empire at war world record in big letters is enough to hit the key demographic of people
interested i think one of the big problems for this thumbnail is also the background has
a lot going on which makes it hard to focus on the elements which are also too small we need
to simplify a lot of this down because not only will it be hard to see when it's shrunk but just
in general there's too much going on let's move on to our next tip about simplicity so you understand
that thumbnails need intent and they need to be quite large because when you shrink them down
it's really hard to see when you put all these things together it also means you need to really
simplify what you're doing with your thumbnails and that brings me to my three rules of thumbnail
simplification one you need a clear background if your background has too much going on it'll be
very hard for people to engage and understand what is going on two i want you to try and limit your
designs to three major elements visuals face text don't put too much more in and three remove any
visuals that do not help you to tell the story if the visuals don't help you sell what your intent
is don't help you sell what the video is ditch them if they make it confusing ditch them if they
generally take up too much space and detract from your main concept ditch them i made this mistake
a lot starting out and in my thumbnails today i still do it but i've worked on it i've made a few
iterations of it and i'm trying to make it more simple an example of too much being done though
is this thumbnail by zeisskuoh i've butchered your name as well i'm sorry it seems like zai has put
a lot of time and energy into making this good they've put a lot of thought into it and they've
really considered it and that's kind of why it's gone wrong because you've got so much going on
some positive words before i say everything though is that i actually love your pitch
like this play this it is simple it is clear the only problem is the rest of your thumbnail
is detracting from that intent i want to ditch the entire background for something more simple
and just pick two shows with the like this next them with an arrow and then just pick two games
that match the shows play this with an arrow next to them if you simplify it down it'll be
a lot clearer we could move zai up to the left and honestly i'd really like to see you putting more
of an excited or interested or just engaging face on i know it's embarrassing to go full
youtuber thumbnail and full youtuber face but it works for a reason also can i just say this video
was great i got intrigued and wanted to see what exactly it was about so i went and checked it out
it's kind of like you're walking around the park and you find a really cool stick as a kid that's
what this video reminded me of it was just this really nice diamond in the rough situation so zai
if you keep making content like this focus on this style don't get distracted you'll do really well
so simplicity is a really common problem that a lot of creators have we try and make things
as engaging as possible and we tend to get carried away and add too many elements and when we add too
many elements it makes it hard for viewers to understand exactly what the video is about in
a split second when they glance over it amongst all the other thumbnails but then we can also have
the opposite problem such as this thumbnail by equals null where you've gone far too simple the
first thing i want to say is you need to grab one of the most common ghost models that is
used all the time and throw it in your thumbnail because the truth is going back to intent as well
most of the time when people add their own face to a thumbnail they're doing it because they're
trying to mimic larger creators but the reason why these people put their face as such a main focus
in thumbnails is because their brand is known and their face is known which means people are
more likely to click on it so for phasmaphobia we need to throw our scary ghost in there on the left
we're gonna move equals over to the right since he is looking right to left we want him looking
at the ghost so people's eyes follow where his eyes are we're gonna ditch the words because
they don't make a reason to click and stop them for letters saying something like that can happen
or first time scares i find text to be one of the hardest elements to incorporate into a thumbnail
so let's cover exactly how i go about trying to incorporate it and then we'll completely rebuild
someone's thumbnail in about two minutes but first i want to throw it out there if this video helps
you out at all please consider subscribing to the channel throwing us a like if you're looking to
connect with thousands of other creators all trying to grow all doing amazing things all
trying to download free overlays then all three of those things are in our discord which is linked in
the description feel free to go check that out it is entirely free it's a really great place
even if you choose to leave right after you should at least check it out right finally text
text is incredibly difficult because it's also subjective about whether or not you should even
add it there are good and bad ways to add it and there are certain videos where you just shouldn't
put text on it at all i do education content which usually needs a little bit of text to help
round out what the story of the video is however there are other videos out there where adding text
is really detrimental for example the thumbnail at the end of this video we're not going to use
any text whatsoever to try and sell the story it just didn't match and i'll explain why in
a second either way there are rules you should always follow if you decide to push forward and
use text in your thumbnail let's take a look at devil rain and yes i've butchered another username
and his thumbnail while i go through these rules you're going to want to use large words
that stand out from your background easily don't use thin fonts use thick easily readable fonts
i recommend using four words or less as well so it isn't hard to read at a glance
make sure these four words are additive meaning they don't just repeat the title they add more
reason to click if we look at my slobs versus obs video i could have just written
slobs versus obs like everyone else who made these videos but i went for time to switch in big
letters with a hard black drop shadow behind it and i also made the switch red to help catch the
eye of potential viewers i'll show you guys how to do these two things when i rebuild someone else's
thumbnail in a second then the arrow from text to obs draws the eye and sells the story of oh hey
he's switching to obs whatever you choose for text make sure it is very direct i make this mistake
all the time where i try and add something for the text but it isn't direct or precise enough so now
we need to look at devil rain's thumbnail properly with all this in mind and we can kind of see where
he goes wrong all of the text is too small there are too many words and because the font is a thin
font when you add this white stroke and the drop shadow to stand out it actually makes it harder
to read which is interesting because normally drop shadows and strokes actually help things stand out
but everything i've talked about today in this video all of the feedback i've given you guys
is very easily fixed and the fact is a lot of you guys are beginners we all start somewhere
i'm not going to show you the thumbnails i made before this youtube channel because i'm
trying to be an authority in the subject so let's put everything into action and rebuild
another one of benja's thumbnails the reason i chose this one was because i think it really
incorporated every mistake that i've talked about in this video i'm sorry ben and i think i had a
really good concept about how i could improve it and simplify it avengers new video was about
how he'd built a bot for twitch chat to control captain quark inside ratchet and clank so that
was the story we needed to tell if we look at this thumbnail you can really tell that everything i've
covered in today's video has gone wrong there are too many elements they're all too small the text
in twitch chat is unreadable because of that and the story is confusing as to what is going
on so let's simplify it and yes i'll be using photoshop but any photo editing software will have
everything i do in this video available for you to use so let's switch over to photoshop and get into
simplifying this down first we need to pick three elements we want to use our intent is to tell the
story of chat controlled quark aka chat controlled game so we need twitch chat and it needs to be
visibly sending commands or controls that look like a gamepad controls let's grab the chat and
drop it on the left hand side over here and let's zoom in so people can see the control commands
if we think about our key demographic they should be familiar with chat controlled games ever since
twitch played pokemon and everything like that happened now we need quark or something from
ratchet and clank let's get a high res image that won't look bad in 1920x1080 thumbnail just because
you guys are using a ps2 emulator doesn't mean you should use a ps2 emulator in your thumbnail
go high res it'll be better for clicks and it isn't lying don't worry we're going to scale
up our new high-res quark and then we're going to use this quick select mask to make a cutout of him
essentially we're just selecting him and removing the background but because i actually like the
background what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click duplicate layer so it stays in the
exact same spot and then i'm going to remove the mask from the lower layer to add the background
back in this gives us a quark on top and it also gives us a background and quark below him
i then put the duplicated layer underneath the chat layer and because we've now duplicated it
it means the cutout is still above chat which means his fingers are also above chat this adds
depth to the image to help add further depth i'm going to add an outer glow just to his cutout
it'll make his fingers stand out well against the black background of the chat another tough part is
connecting the two story elements we have the chat here that has controls and we have the character
we're going to be controlling i tried using text but couldn't find a nice hook i tried things like
chat controlled or this controls this but at the end of the day i really liked the current design
and any text seemed to distract from it so i went with an arrow with a hard drop shadow and
some red to point from chat controls to quark it also helps add a little bit more eye catching to
this section in the middle here that said it just wasn't popping enough for me yet so i go down here
and i add a brightness and contrast layer for the entire comp and then i up the brightness
and contrast just slightly not too much because it'll become gross but just enough to help the
entire image pop and stand out the final step and the most important step of this entire thing
shrink it down and see how it looks when it's much smaller bosh i am very happy with this and
i really think it sells the story now in fact benj is now using this exact thumbnail that i made for
him so clearly he's happy with it too and now the most important part of this video that you guys
always forget to do i need you to comment down below kapow because that is our 100 crew code word
go confuse everyone else and i'll make sure to give you guys your 100 crew badge i appreciate
you watching this i hope it helped you out thank you so much for everyone who submitted
their thumbnails anyway i will see you guys next week thank you so much for watching bye