YouTube Question About a good thumbnail inviting people to watch your video

[tropicthunder]

Hi, and thank you to everyone for providing strategies about improving our youtube channel. However I have a question about the video thumbnail.

I know and I've read here and there that one of the things in order people want to see/click your video is that your thumbnail has to be good, that's true and I'm aware of it, even I occasionally click and watch others video because the thumbnail is attractive. But also in order people can watch your video, it must be recommended by youtube either in homepage, search result and suggestion (the one beside watch page on the right side), so then people can at least see your thumbnail/video.

I've been "investigating" with promoting my video via youtube ads on my several videos. I'm a bit surprised I got like 500-1000 views per video, that's a lot for my newly created channel. I know that with youtube ads, your video will be place on homepage or in suggestion/recomendation section or in-stream (that if you choose that option, I choose the other one).

As for the question regarding the thumbnail, I have to tell you guys that my thumbnail is not SEO at all, not even good or attractive, it's just a text, hand-drawing text, but people still click/view my video even my thumbnail is horrible, like reaally horrible (yes because of youtube ads that place my video on those sections).

So, what are your opinion about this thumbnail ? I know your thumbnail has to be attractive enough, but what about my case ? I guess as long as your video is on homepage/recommended/suggestion section, you have a chance (or better) people will click/view your video even if your thumbnail is horrible like mine.

I want to know about your opinions or suggestions about this. Thank you.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

Thumbnails are absolutely CRITICAL. It is the portal someone must walk through in order for your video to be viewed, it is the only invitation that they get and it is in competition with millions of others. It must be the absolute best thumbnail that it can be.

But best is not what people often assume it to be. Often times a video can be an absolute viral hit with the generic screengrab that YouTube provides. Why is it that this can compete against the millions of videos with these renowned graphic artists utilizing he entire Adobe suite to create their thumbnails? Because people come to YouTube not for CBS or NBC. They don't always want to watch The entire Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sometimes they just want to spend a few minutes hanging out with a guy catching a few fish off the beach, and the generic screengrab of that experience is best representation of that experience. It can be a difficult process, but you need to spend a good amount of time... most people (including myself) suggest making 100 videos... in order to understand your audience and what they like. What elements of the thumbnail do they find most attractive? TubeBuddy has an entire suite of tools (Click Magnet) specifically focusing on this; it dives deep into information like whether your audience prefers a close-up shot of your face or no face at all, text or no text and do people prefer when you smile or not. These are things that it just takes time to learn.

Now, about those ads.

You can absolute catch a few views with those ads. But let's do a very general breakdown of this. You got 1,000 views on a video from an ad. Typically you will pull something like 1% of these viewers as subscribers. So how much did this ad cost and is it worth 10 subscribers? Now... is your answer to that question better than the option of simply mastering your SEO and letting YouTube collect those views/subscriber organically for you... for free.

You can put out all the ads you want, I get it. We all want to explode overnight and the promise of an immediate 1,000 views is tempting. But if you look at it realistically the means does not support the end.

 

[tropicthunder]

You can absolute catch a few views with those ads. But let's do a very general breakdown of this. You got 1,000 views on a video from an ad. Typically you will pull something like 1% of these viewers as subscribers. So how much did this ad cost and is it worth 10 subscribers? Now... is your answer to that question better than the option of simply mastering your SEO and letting YouTube collect those views/subscriber organically for you... for free.

You can put out all the ads you want, I get it. We all want to explode overnight and the promise of an immediate 1,000 views is tempting. But if you look at it realistically the means does not support the end.

This. That's why I don't take the views seriously because it's not counting as a hard work to get that views, at least for me. I've been learning about youtube SEO for the past 3 months but without using TubeBuddy and other similar stuff, and recently I started to learn about TubeBuddy, spent several hours on this forum to learn something, actually a lot. About getting subs from youtube ads, it's not much, about 51 subs, that's for the price of about $20, total views I got from two videos is about 3200-ish. I guess it's not worthy ?! Idk.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

I

This. That's why I don't take the views seriously because it's not counting as a hard work to get that views, at least for me. I've been learning about youtube SEO for the past 3 months but without using TubeBuddy and other similar stuff, and recently I started to learn about TubeBuddy, spent several hours on this forum to learn something, actually a lot. About getting subs from youtube ads, it's not much, about 51 subs, that's for the price of about $20, total views I got from two videos is about 3200-ish. I guess it's not worthy ?! Idk.

It's nice, don't get me wrong. 50 subs is cool and actually better than most of the stories I hear. But at a price of $20 you are paying 40 cents per sub. Which equates to $4,000 for 10,000 subscribers... which isn't enough to make a living off of. That would cost you more like $60,000 - $100,000.

So yeah; a few subs, a few extra views and some exposure is nice. Ads just aren't worth it. They aren't sustainable longterm. Learn SEO and best practices. That is the thing that YouTube is best at; discovery. It's a search engine. Learn to use it as a creator and you can join the nearly 10,000 creators who have built channels with over 1 million subscribers and you can do so without spending a dime on ads.

 

[tropicthunder]

So yeah; a few subs, a few extra views and some exposure is nice. Ads just aren't worth it. They aren't sustainable longterm. Learn SEO and best practices. That is the thing that YouTube is best at; discovery. It's a search engine. Learn to use it as a creator and you can join the nearly 10,000 creators who have built channels with over 1 million subscribers and you can do so without spending a dime on ads.

This is so true, it's not a sustainable longterm, it could burn out money easily. Anyway, about that 51 subs I got from it, do you think that people really subs to my channel because they saw it's on recommendation/suggestion and thinking that "this must be good because youtube recommending it" or they really watch my content and like it so they decided to subscribe ? I'm curious, if they're really like my content then it surprised me, because I dont think they'll like it. I made that new channel just to experimenting with youtube ads.

 

[Stanley | Team TB]

This is so true, it's not a sustainable longterm, it could burn out money easily. Anyway, about that 51 subs I got from it, do you think that people really subs to my channel because they saw it's on recommendation/suggestion and thinking that "this must be good because youtube recommending it" or they really watch my content and like it so they decided to subscribe ? I'm curious, if they're really like my content then it surprised me, because I dont think they'll like it. I made that new channel just to experimenting with youtube ads.

I would think they actually subscribed because they watched. Those 'suggested' videos also have a tag that flags them as a promoted video, so people understand that they are going into a video that has been boosted. I can't think of a reason why someone would click on that and subscribe if they didn't get the value they wanted out of it to do so.

 

[BraveStar]

Whenever I see people talk about using Youtube Ads to show their channel or video to viewers through an ad on other people's videos I always tell them the story of a Youtuber who learned the hard way what a terrible idea it was to have done this very thing.

He went from less than 200 subs to almost 900 in just a few weeks and he was excited he was about to hit the 1000 sub goal for the YTPP until it didn't happen. He noticed he his a wall where his numbers just stopped growing and he couldn't figure out why. Turns out many of the subs he got from the ad were people simply subscribing because they saw his ad on Pewdie Pie's videos and they wanted to simply help him out. But not only did his subs stop growing once the ad stopped playing, his view barely grew in response to the number of new subs. Normally creator's views are higher than their sub count when you're a smaller channel because their video is shared often but viewers don't necessarily subscribe. He was still underperforming in views even though he had just under 900 subs. He then slowly learned his mistake and started learning how to grow his channel. Years later he's already passed 6000 subs but he learned a hard truth that day that growth on YT is a balance of good content and hard work and not simply just getting people to subscribe just to subscribe.