- Now at this point, you might be thinking,
how is this person gonna convince me
that click bait is actually a good thing.
Well, buckle up.
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury
I'd like to present to you exhibit-a
the person watching this video right now.
Today, I'm here to share with you my thoughts
on this highly frowned upon practice.
Using click bait in your titles and your thumbnails.
Let me ask you this.
Have you ever made a video and thought to yourself,
crap, what am I gonna title this video?
What's the thumbnail gonna be?
I certainly have and in some cases, I still do.
Sometimes I republish livestream clips
and in the moment, I'm never thinking about
what the title and the thumbnail might be
if this clip happens to live on its own on YouTube someday.
Or sometimes I publish a new video
and the title in the thumbnail I chose,
just aren't cutting it.
So I think to myself, maybe I can change these.
Sometimes I just love an idea so much
that I start outlining a video before I've even considered
what the title or the thumbnail might be.
You know what? That's future dance problem.
I think you see my point.
The best thing you can do for your content
is planning your title and your thumbnail
before you ever hit record.
And for this video, that exactly what I did.
I knew what the title of this video was going to be
and I had at least some idea
of what the thumbnail for this video might look like.
And this brings us to the topic of click bait.
I wanna show you some examples,
but first let's talk about this video,
the one you're watching right now.
Did I click bait you into watching this video?
Well, you already might have really strong opinions
about that one way or the other.
But let me give you my take on what click bait actually is.
If this video about click bait being a good thing
was instead focused on
the pros and cons of puppies versus kittens
then yeah, I think it's fair to say that I click baited you
into watching my thoughts on puppies versus kittens.
The answer is kittens, by the way, obviously.
But in this video we are talking
about click bait being a good thing.
So because I'm delivering on that promise
of the title and the thumbnail,
no, in my opinion, this video is not click bait.
Unless, what if I told you
that I don't in reality, actually believe the statement,
"click bait is a good thing."
Now is this video click bait?
Feel free to argue about that in the comments below.
What I will say though,
is that just because a video's title and thumbnail
come off as a bit provocative,
that doesn't necessarily mean they're click bait.
What I'm setting out to do in this video
is encourage creators like yourselves
to push this envelope just a little bit more
if you're not already.
After all the whole point of titles and thumbnails
is to get your videos seen in the first place.
So take a minute to think about the types of videos
that YouTube offers you on the home feed or in search
every single day.
What aspects of those videos
actually win your click at the end of the day?
Really look at your home feed and think about this.
Logan Paul has a number of examples here
and let's take a look at some of the videos
about Pokemon Cards he's recently done.
I spent $150,000 on this Pokemon Card.
I spent $2,000,000 on Pokemon Cards
and more recently I lost $3,500,000 on fake Pokemon Cards.
In each one of these examples,
you're looking at a video that has a dead simple title,
a dead simple thumbnail
but the thing that really wins the click
is the sheer amount of money,
that shock value that's being spent on these cards.
Now obviously,
most people out there don't have millions of dollars
laying around to spend on Pokemon cards,
but that's kind of the point.
That's why these videos are so clickable.
So when you're thinking about
how you could apply this strategy to your own channel,
you need to be considering what makes you unique.
What makes the thing you are doing unique.
Now, well I think these videos prove my point
and I could be done here,
I'm gonna show you another example.
One that doesn't involve millions and millions of dollars.
Now this is Farzy,
he has a Minecraft channel that has 358,000 subscribers
but 318,000 of the subscribers came just in the last year.
Obviously, you would think this is really challenging to do
given that Minecrafters, 'so saturated,' as they say.
But as you can see,
Farzy is applying a lot of the same strategies
that we're talking about here and very effectively.
I made giant greenhouse and bee farm.
On the right side of the thumbnail,
we can see the greenhouse and it looks incredible
and on the left side of the thumbnail
he's showing the results of having this greenhouse.
For those who don't understand Minecraft
he's producing a lot of honey.
Every Minecraft mob's weakness.
This video is sitting at 2.8 million views
and is currently getting a thousand views every hour.
The thumbnail is a visualization of the title.
It shows just a few different Minecraft mobs
and it says mob weaknesses.
Farzy's been trying out different strategies here
for a very long time now
and he's found the perfect formula.
The videos that resonate with his audience
and also videos like mob weaknesses
that bring in tons and tons of new viewers too.
So when showing you these examples,
don't forget that this is going to take some practice,
some time and some effort on your part.
For this last example,
we're gonna take a look at Mr. Beast channel,
cause we can't talk about titles and thumbnails
without talking about Mr. Beast.
First to rob a bank wins $100000.
Let's try something with this thumbnail
a little bit different.
I've gone ahead and stolen Mr. Beast thumbnail
and applied it to one of our vidIQ videos
that hasn't been released yet.
Using our thumbnail preview tool,
I've typed in the search term, rob a bank
and I'm gonna hit preview and search results.
Now ignoring the title and just looking at the thumbnail,
you can see it amongst all the other thumbnails
that would rank for the search term, 'rob a bank'
I'm gonna send it to home screen
and now I'm presented with six totally different videos
as if I was looking at the YouTube home feed.
As I suspected,
Mr. Beast thumbnail is really standing out here.
But why is that?
Why is his thumbnail so much more clickable
than any of the other thumbnails on the screen right now?
For one thing,
it helps that the title of the video isn't even needed
and you can already tell what it's about
if you look carefully.
A person is hanging from a rope.
They look like they're in a bank vault
and they're grabbing a whole chunk of money
off of a table full of money.
There are only a few dominant colors here
in this thumbnail, such as green, yellow, and orange.
The thing that gets you to stop scrolling
is that giant green pile of money.
And of course everyone wants to learn more
when they see a pile of money.
But the cool thing about this thumbnail
is that your eye travels from the money
to the other parts of the thumbnail that tell a story.
This person has broken into a bank vault
and you can tell because of the vault door
and the red light in the corner.
They're taking something that's clearly not theirs
and if you've spent that amount of time,
just looking at the thumbnail
and getting the story in your brain,
you're probably gonna look at the title
for that last bit of convincing
that you need to click on the video,
which is, the first to rob a bank wins $100000.
We know it's about robbing a bank
but what we didn't know until we read the title,
was that someone's going to win $100000.
This means you're gearing up to watch a fun competition
with some real stakes involved.
And for me, an eight minute video
is just not that big of a commitment
to see what this is all about.
The last point I wanna make about this video
is that while you're watching
you realize that this is not a real bank,
that is not a real bank vault.
That's clearly a set that was built
for the purposes of this video.
And now one could argue that this video is click bait
because people aren't robbing a real bank,
and that my friends, is the part where I would argue,
it doesn't even matter.
The title didn't say,
'first person to rob a real bank wins $100000.'
That's a bank vault
because Mr. Beast says, it's a bank vault.
His friends are robbing it
because he says they're robbing it.
He's certainly not opening the door
and giving them the money.
And these are the thoughts
that you should be running through your own head
when you're publishing your own video
with a new title and a thumbnail
and you're just a little bit worried.
Am I click baiting people?
Basically whenever I upload a new video,
I have a dummy check.
Is the video that I made
delivering on the thumbnails, title and promise
or a perceived value.
The last thing I'm trying to do
is encourage anybody to deceive their audience.
What I'm actually saying is that when possible,
your titles and your thumbnails
should have some kind of emotional pull.
And when that's not possible,
another thumbnail tip I have for you
is see if you can make your thumbnail
visualize the actual title of your video.
As you build trust with your viewers
they'll ultimately be the ones who decide
whether your video is click bait or not.
We recently applied all of these strategies
to one of our latest videos
and you should probably click on this because in it
we discuss the possibility that YouTube is dying.