- A very simple question this one,
can you make custom thumbnails for your YouTube Shorts?
Let's find out.
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Until very recently, it's been really tough to check out
what your YouTube Shorts thumbnails would look like
because they appear randomly on the shelf.
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However, thanks to the new ability to add YouTube Shorts
as a featured section to your YouTube channel,
you can now see exactly what thumbnail is presented
to a viewer.
For the full tutorial on how to add that feature section
to your YouTube channel, check out the guide over here.
In this video, what we're gonna do is,
go into the YouTube studio,
change some of the thumbnails for these YouTube Shorts,
and then check the featured section of our channel page
to see if those thumbnails have changed.
To test this along with the YouTube Short section
on this channel, I have created a playlist of three videos
where I'm going to change the thumbnails because remember,
vertical videos of 60 seconds or less,
can be viewed as regular videos or YouTube Shorts.
For example, this is the same video
seen in two different ways on my channel.
What happens when I change the thumbnail for that video,
we're not trying to do anything fancy here.
All we're doing is going into the video details page
for the video, and changing the default thumbnail
to one of the other automatic thumbnails
that YouTube has to offer us.
In each of these examples,
I'm choosing the thumbnail that looks the most different
to the original, so it's clear to see whether the thumbnail
has actually changed when we return to the channel page.
So as a reminder, these are the original thumbnails,
and these are the now updated thumbnails,
let's compare them to the YouTube Short thumbnails.
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As you can see, despite being exactly the same video,
the YouTube Shorts do not reflect the updated thumbnails,
this confirms that you have absolutely no control
over what image is displayed to a viewer
when it comes to viewing YouTube Shorts thumbnail.
As a final control test,
I did change the videos to complete custom thumbnails
as opposed to the ones that YouTube
automatically offers you.
And as expected, no changing the YouTube Shorts thumbnails.
So, now that you know that custom thumbnails
do not work on YouTube Shorts,
what does that mean for you as a creator?
Well, first of all, it means that titles
are all the more important.
That's the only thing you control
when a viewer swipes through that feed.
So that title has to grab a viewers attention.
And also consider this,
a viewer is not going to find your YouTube Short
through search, it will just appear for them
as they're randomly going through content.
So think less about search engine optimization,
and more about emotional trigger optimization.
It needs to be short,
snappy and have a very quick light-bulb moment,
the viewer has to get what you're trying to talk about
in the title in I would say, less than a second.
Also try and keep that title to less than 40 characters
because it will get cut off on the Shorts' shelf
and then it loses context.
Now, does this mean you should not bother
creating custom thumbnails at all for YouTube Shorts?
Well, that's where it gets a little bit complicated
and confusing, because of the nature of YouTube Shorts.
Our gaming expert Dan,
created a very simple Minecraft YouTube Shorts video,
a month ago and it recently exploded in views
gaining half a million,
as is often the case with YouTube Shorts.
Notice the laughable ad revenue is generated by the way,
more on that in a future video.
The interesting thing here is the traffic source of views.
While nearly 80% of the views on the video
do come from YouTube Shorts traffic,
20% come from elsewhere.
And in these cases,
that represents 10s of thousands of views.
So for those potential views outside of YouTube Shorts,
would you rather have a random thumbnail,
or one you have created?
Increasing the click through rate.
In summary, YouTube Shorts are not YouTube videos,
which means that you have to prioritize certain aspects
of the content in different ways.
For example, for a regular YouTube video,
the thumbnail is way up at the top of the list
but for YouTube Short, it's somewhere down here.
We'll continue to educate you on YouTube Shorts
so make sure to subscribe,
and of course enjoy the rest of your video making day.
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