- Custom thumbnails on your YouTube videos
are super important,
we've already established that,
but here's a question.
How can changing thumbnails on your old videos
potentially result in a massive upsurge in views?
Let's find out.
- [Voiceover] vidIQ.
- [Voiceover] (whispering) vidIQ.com.
- I'm Rob, welcome back to vidIQ,
and if you haven't already realized,
you are slap bang in the middle of a series
all about how to make better thumbnails
to get you more views.
For the full playlist,
make sure to click over here.
And if you need help,
not only with your thumbnails,
but with researching YouTube, analyzing videos,
auditing your own channel, and taking actual steps
that will get you more views and subscribers,
make sure to download the vidIQ Chrome extension.
It is free and there is a link in the video description.
Now, let's talk about your past thumbnails.
Your previous endeavors in the world of creating imagery
probably wasn't that great.
I mean, take a look at ours, for example.
Wow, look at how busy these thumbnails are.
Loads of text, very little consistency,
definitely room for improvement.
And a year later, we were getting somewhere.
More punch, more impact,
but for some reason,
I was going for a weird starburst phase of color schemes,
until we reach today.
Simple, consistent, and powerful.
Now, we know for a fact that our thumbnails are better
than what they used to be
because if we look at our
YouTube click-through rate analytics,
it tells us that people are twice as likely
to click on our videos than they were this time last year.
And with all that in mind,
it does raise the following question.
Should you go back through your old videos
and update the thumbnails to the skills you have now
in the hope that you will get more clicks and more views?
Well, this case study might answer that question.
In a recent article on Variety.com,
a link of which I will leave in the video description,
even Vevo, one of the largest providers
of musical content on YouTube,
admitted to their own failing when it came to thumbnails.
Nine months ago,
they decided to embark on a hugely ambitious project
to update the thumbnails on thousands of their videos.
So that they went from looking like this,
to looking like this.
As always, you can be the ultimate judge
of which thumbnail is best,
but I'm pretty confident this will be a unanimous decision,
since you can actually see stuff in the updated thumbnail.
The short term effect was quite staggering,
which we can see
through vidIQ's historical view count timeline.
After the initial surge of views,
that Vevo videos will always get,
things were starting to flatline,
but that switch in thumnbail
was just the injection the video needed,
giving it an immediate jolt in views
as well as more evergreen momentum afterwards.
Vevo say that that thumbnail change for that specific video
resulted in a 4000% increase in views
over a two week period,
before settling down, as you saw.
Now, obviously a sample size of just one
is going to give you some pretty extraordinary results,
but what about if you do this over 4000 videos.
Well, that's exactly what Vevo did
and this is what happened.
On average, there was a marked increase in views
over a 20 day period,
before leveling off to an improved rate of over 5%,
compared to how the videos performed
prior to the thumbnail change.
So, this is a no brainer, isn't it?
I need to go through all of the terrible thumbnails
I was making three years ago,
update them all, and I'm guaranteed views.
(record scratch)
Yeah, not so fast.
It's important to remember
that pretty much every video Vevo releases
comes with some traction of view velocity,
so that even a few years down the line,
that video will be getting hundreds of thousands or views.
For smaller channels who have less views overall,
and less evergreen content,
it's pointless to choose videos
that are getting no views whatsoever,
and change the thumbnails on them,
expecting views to suddenly come.
What you need to do is think smartly and be selective.
Choose the videos that already have evergreen value
on your channel.
And you do that by looking at the real time analytics.
It's better to do this in the classic YouTube Studio for now
as it shows you the thumbnails.
When you first open real time analytics,
it will show you videos by most recent,
but you can sort by which videos
are bringing in the most views
over the last 48 hours or 60 minutes.
If you sort by either of these,
you can soon pick out the videos that could be months,
even years old, and still bringing in views.
This is called evergreen content,
and what you can do is identify videos
that are still performing well
but look like they have old, rubbish thumbnails.
For example, this three year old video
still brings in 440 views every 48 hours.
That's over 6000 views per month.
It definitely still has value.
Maybe if we updated the thumbnail to match our current style
and made it more clickable,
we could boost those views up to 500, even more.
But, I hear you ask,
is it not a bad idea to start tinkering
with titles and thumbnails and stuff
on videos that are performing well?
Isn't it best to leave it alone?
Well, that's what we used to think,
but here's what YouTube say.
In a recent Q and A session
with the search and discovery team at YouTube,
they said this about tinkering with your videos.
"It all depends on whether the updates make them
"better for the viewer, worse, or about the same.
"There is no disadvantage in the system
"related to updating these,
"so if you think you have an improvement, give it a try."
So, just remember that
when your previously evergreen content falls off a cliff.
YouTube said that, not us.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this topic
and share your stories
of when you've changed thumbnails on your older videos
to great success.
Let us know in the comments below.
Otherwise, you should see some content
surrounding my face right now.
We'll see you on those videos.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day.