- Beyond the video content itself,
custom thumbnails are probably the
most important YouTube tool you have in your arsenal.
So if I asked the question, why is
it important to do this (snaps),
(slide whistle blows)
and why you should pay attention to this (dings),
well, if you're not sure on the answers,
you'll find out the the end of this video.
Let's do this.
Well, that doesn't really work 'cause I'm not full-screen.
Roll intro.
- [Man] vidIQ.
- [Woman] vidIQ.
- [Whispering Voice] vidiq.com.
(reflective music)
- First of all, let's sort this problem out.
(groans)
And now let's do the camera punch.
Hadouken! (smacks)
Hello everybody.
Welcome back to vidIQ.
I am Rob, and if you haven't already realized,
you are at the very beginning of a video series
on how to make custom thumbnails that get you more views.
For the full playlist, make sure you click over here.
But since this is the first video
in the series, you probably wanna stick
around and learn the absolute basics
to why custom thumbnails are so important.
And if you're a regular to vidIQ,
you probably heard me say this one before.
Readers judge books by their covers.
Viewers judge videos by their thumbnails.
It's unavoidable.
You have a tiny window of opportunity
to grab that person's attention
and draw them into your video.
So let's jump into how to make custom thumbnails
and we'll start with this example.
This video you see on-screen is about
how to download a thumbnail from YouTube,
but the current thumbnail for this video
that's been selected by YouTube
automatically is a rather useless picture
of myself that tells the viewer absolutely nothing.
But with the help of a custom thumbnail,
we can tell a much more colorful,
intriguing, and direct visual story
that might just earn this video an extra click.
And here is the good news.
To start using custom thumbnails,
you don't need a single view, subscriber,
or minute of watch time, but you do need
to verify your YouTube account.
Verifying your account literally takes one minute,
and it just so happens we have a complete beginner's guide
on how to do it over here.
So if you haven't already done this,
verifying your YouTube account
to unlock custom thumbnails, along
with lots of other things, has
just jumped to the top of your YouTube priority list.
Get it done now.
(upbeat dance music)
All right, then.
Now you've got access to custom thumnails,
let's have a look at some of the technical aspects
of how to create them.
The minimum recommended resolution is 1280 by 720,
which funnily enough is what this video is looking
like right now, until I do this (snaps).
Now we're back up to 1920 by 1080.
Can anybody tell the difference?
Hopefully it should look a little sharper,
and that's the type of resolution you want.
If you go any higher, then you're gonna face two problems.
First of all, when you start to create
really high resolution images,
when you shrink them down to thumbnail preview size,
they can look a little weird.
But more importantly, YouTube has a
very restrictive file size when it comes to thumbnails.
You have just two meg to play with.
Keep that in mind if you intend
to create really complex images.
And finally, make sure to save
your thumbnails in one of the following file formats.
JPEG, GIF, or jiff, BMP, and PNG.
Another advantage of creating thumbnails
at this resolution is that it matches the aspect ratio
of how 99.9% of your potential audience will see them,
which is the classic 16 by nine widescreen shape.
And what do I mean by that?
Well, have you ever seen thumbnails that look like this?
(slide whistle blows)
That's when somebody's taken a portrait picture
and tried to use it as a landscape thumbnail.
It's not really ideal, is it?
And it doesn't look professional.
So let me just fix this (blows),
and then bring this in, and if
you stick to these basic YouTube thumbnail principles,
you should be off and running.
Pay attention folks, because if
there is one thing you take away
from this video, it's this next tip.
It is absolutely crucial for the success of your thumbnails.
When you design your thumbnail,
you get the whole experience,
but everybody else gets this experience,
and I like to call it the 10% rule.
At full size, this thumbnail looks colorful,
but pretty basic.
There are, what?
Maybe three elements to it.
A person, and object, and a background.
However, when you shrink it down
to 10% of its original size, is everything
you saw before still recognizable and easy to understand?
It's the same for YouTube thumbnails
as seen on mobile devices, although
this might be more the 25% rule, or the 30% rule.
And and if that thumbnail needs explaining
to you, check out the video on-screen now.
Basically what I'm trying to tell you is this.
When you create your custom thumbnail,
make sure to shrink it down to 10%
of its size to see how everybody
else is gonna see that thumbnail when it ends up on YouTube.
If you don't, you end up with thumbnails
that look like this.
A thumbnail full of 20 random Lego pieces that,
when you shrink it down, are impossible to see.
A Fortnite menu screen that, when shrunk
down to thumbnail preview size, loses all of its context.
And an image of a tank set amongst a background
of similar colors which, when resized,
is impossible to pick out, although
I do like the text in this one.
These are all examples of thumbnails
from channels we audited on our
weekly Channel Audit livestream.
Subscribe to vidIQ to make sure
you get a notification for that.
Those are all examples of where applying
the 10% rule could help guide the video creator
to make better thumbnails.
On the other hand, there are video creators
we audit every week that have fantastic thumbnails
that you should pay attention to.
This one is bold, bright, and simple,
which, when we resize to match the rest
of the competition in this little game
of compare-the-thumbnail, is,
for me at least, the standout winner.
But I'll let you decide right now
by using the voting poll in the top right-hand corner
of the screen, and by doing this,
you'll help demonstrate the importance
of something called click-through rate.
Every time a viewer sees one of
your thumbnails, that counts as an impression.
Every time somebody clicks on one
of those thumbnails, that is a view, of course (dings).
And you can calculate the click-through rate from that.
For example, let's say your thumbnail is shown 100 times,
and it's clicked on 10 times, that's 10% click-through rate.
Now, on YouTube, it does get a lot
more complicated than that, and we've done a lot
more detailed videos on the topic.
But basically, click-through rate is a representation
of how powerful and effective
your titles and your thumbnails are.
To review the click-through rate
on your channel, you will need
to go to the new YouTube Studio beta.
From the dashboard screen, click
on Analytics, and then from the top row
of tabs, click on Reach Viewers,
and finally Impressions to click-through rate box.
A question that's often asked at
this point is, what is a good click-through rate?
And YouTube's answer is between two and 10%.
But what I would say is forget
all that and set your current click-through rate
as a benchmark and aim to improve on that.
The reason I say that is because
it's impossible to compare your click-through rate
to anybody else's because the type
of content, and the style of a channel,
and the size of a channel, amongst
many other things, can have a huge influence
on how many people click on your thumbnails.
All that you should be doing is working
with the numbers you know and understand.
Working with somebody else's numbers is going
to drive you utterly insane.
That's precisely what we focused on,
here at vidIQ, and our click-through rate has gone
from this 12 months ago to this today.
As you can see, when click-through rate goes up,
so does everything else.
Time for a little bit of fun.
Did you know that Google can tell
you all sorts of things about your thumbnail,
which are unnervingly accurate,
including, really importantly for YouTube,
whether or not your thumbnail is safe.
Take a look at this.
It's called Cloud Vision.
It's free to use right now and
I'll leave a link in the video description.
All you need to do is upload a thumbnail
to it and it will spit out the following information.
It can tell me, with 94% confidence,
that the main emotion in this thumbnail is surprise.
It knows this thumbnail contains a person,
a man, in fact, and it can even pick out the traffic sign.
It's even trying to pick out specific body parts
and actions.
It doesn't always get things right, however.
This thumbnail has nothing to do
with drug awareness, although, just remember this.
Stay in school, kids.
And it looks like it may be linking
my face on the vidIQ logo to all
of the PewDiePie versus T-Series content we've been making.
That is weird and scary at the same time.
The text section is a bit useless
because we don't have much of it,
but it does show us the dominant colors in the thumbnail.
Perhaps the most important tab,
however, is the last one, Safe Search.
This tells us how safe Google thinks the image is,
and we know that YouTube does analyze thumbnails
to ensure that they are safe for the viewer.
So if you do create a thumbnail
that is a little edgy, it might be a good idea
to run it through this first.
Oh, and Rob
Racy Wilson.
That Cloud Vision is certainly an impressive glance
into the world of artificial intelligence.
Stick some of your thumbnails through
it and let us know what it comes
out with in the comments below.
As I said at the top of this video,
we've only just started with the weird
and wonderful world of custom thumbnails.
We'll be going into a lot more theory
in the videos on this playlist over here,
and for more awesome vidIQ stuff,
we've got some more videos down there.
We'll see you on either of those.
Right now, enjoy the rest of your video-making day.