Three Ways to Optimize Thumbnails
Three simple ways adjusting your thumbnails will attract more viewers + Mr. Beast's epic squid game release
Dear Creator Nation,
We’re back. You didn’t think we would disappear from your inbox after taking one stab at writing about black squid game, did you? We’re here to provide consistent and concrete tools for YouTubers to 10X their channel, regardless of who’s reading this— whether it’s Mr. Beast or my ultra-proud great aunt.
A quick note: at AMA, we believe that the future of entrepreneurship and the creator economy is rooted in this idea of “building in public”, which refers to developing a product or service alongside a community of users, friends, and fans.
building in public = real time feedback & networking
One week since launching our own content strategy, we’ve gone from:
Twitter followers: 135 → 166
Newsletter subscribers: 202 → 222
Most notably, we’ve started new conversations with two YouTubers with a combined 6.7 million subscribers! We are also connecting with various founders, including Bleacher Report’s Dave Nemetz.
While ambitious, we’re striving to hit 2,500 twitter followers and 1,000 newsletter subscribers in the next six months. 🎓 This won’t be easy, but we’ve developed a set of growth strategies that might just help us get there. Like a political campaign, we’re starting grassroots: engaging creators and their audiences through twitter DMs, threads on YouTubers, and data advice. We hope you’ll join us on this journey! 🤓
📈 3 Ways to Optimize Thumbnails
Just like how athletes win their real trophies during practice “off the court,” YouTubers win followers not just through creative content but from mind-blowing thumbnails. Think about the last time you clicked on a video. Did the content really excite you or did your monkey-brain kick in and tell you to click on the thumbnail with the most color and tease? I know what my answer is…
So, how can you design thumbnails to increase the likelihood of someone clicking on your latest content? It’s largely psychological, but the data lend a number of essential techniques that YouTubers should utilize:
PLAY TO YOUR NICHE & EXPRESS YOURSELF
We compared dozens of thumbnail structures from hundreds of videos from one of our favorite partners: Ali Abdaal. After spending 14 minutes watching one of his videos on productivity, we got to work and scoured through the data to determine what worked best. In general, expressive faces win the day. For Ali, when his handsome and smiley face was highlighted in the thumbnail, his videos performed better. For lifestyle influencers, it might be the classic “ah” face that attracts emotionally-driven fans. For gamers, serious and intense expressions get the blood pumping.
When Ali posted an action shot or thumbnail with multiple people, his videos had a higher click-through-rate but lower engagement, which means that clicks didn’t translate into views. Similarly, another creator we’re working with received 32% less views than average on videos that featured more than one person in the thumbnail.
HAVE AN IMAGE OR TEXT IN THE BACKGROUND
This time, we dove into thumbnail averages for one of our largest clients, an entertainer with over 15 million subscribers. We saw that the background of a thumbnail is arguably as important as the focal point of the video itself. Beyond showcasing a single person or object, having a background image or text attracted more viewers.
This insight is slept on in the YouTube creator world 😴, but most analyses we’ve run show the same thing. A popular movie clips channel, for instance, drew 44% more viewers when they included text in the thumbnail. Graham Stephan, king of YouTube finance, crushes this:
DEPTH > BREADTH
depth: [the perceived distance between the background and the foreground of a composition]
Wait, WTF does that mean? Basically, depth is a technique that makes photos and images look more real and three-dimensional, like this:
We noticed across all of our creators that adding depth to your thumbnail is a great technique to maximize click-through-rate. When one of our creators lacked depth in their thumbnails, those videos received 33% less views than if there was an additional focal point featured in the background of a thumbnail.
🎥 Video of the Week
👹 Youtuber: Mr. Beast
👀 Views: 8.1M (in three hours!)
👍 Likes: 1.8M
💬 Comments: 97k
🔔 Subscribers: 76.2M
💘 Why we loved it: This is American Ninja Warrior, the Hunger Games, and teenage summer camp blended into a single video. Aside from being incredibly entertaining, it’s clear the Mr. Beast put an incredible amount of effort and thought into this video. From understanding Squid Game intricacies to human incentives, this video was carefully crafted to the smallest detail. The title was the ultimate allure: $456,000 Squid Game in Real Life!
📋 Content for Creators:
Jake Paul’s biggest controversies: how the notorious YouTuber found fame through scandal by Kat Tenbarge and Rachel E. Greenspan — Jake Paul’s unique journey in building the ultimate personal brand
Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations by Paul Covington, Jay Adams, Emre Sargin — How YouTube’s recommendation system works at a deeply technical level
Elle Mills: Life after Burnout from (The Colin and Samir Show) — insightful convo with Elle Mills about life & YouTube burnout
🎬 Action Steps:
Read our twitter thread on 3️⃣ ways Shelby Church can leverage crypto to engage and monetize her community!
Want to get your video or YouTube channel featured on Creator’s Toolbox? Contact us ➡️ info@ama-digital.com
Learn anything from this newsletter? Subscribe and share it with a friend. Help us reach 250 subscribers by the end of the year (we’re at 222)!
Have a great rest of the week creators!
Sent with 💜,
AMA