This question goes a little beyond just being a thumbnails question, and spans a bit more into a shorts question.
This video, from memory, was an accidental release, meaning when I uploaded it, it automatically went public instead of private (via mobile upload) thus, it selected a default thumbnail. I figured I'd let it run and see what happens in terms of CTR. Maybe an obvious mobile upload looking thumbnail might perform better visually for CTR purposes.
Now I decided, let's see what happens when we upload when I upload an actual custom thumbnail. Was very curious to see if a stock thumbnail might work better than a custom one, and it seems the stock one performed 14% better than the custom one. I'm trying to understand the phycology of why that might be.
Might it be the traffic source? Shorts only accounts for 14% of the traffic source, so I don't think it's necessarily the fact that on the shorts shelf, the thumbnail doesn't show anyway.
Maybe the original just looks "better"? which is odd to me, maybe it's just a lot simpler, thus cleaner, thus more enticing to click? I wanted to give it a custom thumbnail to keep consistent with the rest of my channel recently, but going by this A/B test, it might be better off leaving it how it is.
If you've used the A/B test feature, how do you read your results and interpret them?
This video, from memory, was an accidental release, meaning when I uploaded it, it automatically went public instead of private (via mobile upload) thus, it selected a default thumbnail. I figured I'd let it run and see what happens in terms of CTR. Maybe an obvious mobile upload looking thumbnail might perform better visually for CTR purposes.
Now I decided, let's see what happens when we upload when I upload an actual custom thumbnail. Was very curious to see if a stock thumbnail might work better than a custom one, and it seems the stock one performed 14% better than the custom one. I'm trying to understand the phycology of why that might be.
Might it be the traffic source? Shorts only accounts for 14% of the traffic source, so I don't think it's necessarily the fact that on the shorts shelf, the thumbnail doesn't show anyway.
Maybe the original just looks "better"? which is odd to me, maybe it's just a lot simpler, thus cleaner, thus more enticing to click? I wanted to give it a custom thumbnail to keep consistent with the rest of my channel recently, but going by this A/B test, it might be better off leaving it how it is.
If you've used the A/B test feature, how do you read your results and interpret them?
