My thumbnail game was stuck in 2018 until a random comment woke me up

I used to spend like 2 hours on each thumbnail. Lots of layers, blending modes, all this fancy stuff in Photoshop. I thought I was making art. Then some dude commented last month saying my thumbnails looked cluttered and he almost scrolled past. At first I got defensive. But I looked back at my old stuff vs my recent stuff and he was right. I switched to doing simpler thumbnails with just 3 elements max. Big text, one main subject, bright background. Takes me 20 minutes now and my click rate went up like 15%. Has anyone else found that doing less actually works better for engagement?

3 comments

3 Comments

quinna8924d ago

Wait, has anyone else gotten obsessed with a completely different content type after the thumbnail wake up call? Cause me, I found myself re-editing all my old titles after I fixed my thumbs. Started noticing my titles were also way too wordy and crammed with keywords. Now I just do a short punchy phrase, like "the ONE trick" or "he never saw it coming." Its honestly wild how stripping everything down made my whole channel feel cleaner. My watch time went up too, not just CTR. Feels like less is actually more in every part of the video now.

michaeld4824d ago

My buddy did the same thing @quinna89, swapped long titles for three word phrases and doubled his views.

kelly63824d ago

are we really acting like shorter titles is the secret sauce to doubling views lol. i mean maybe his content just got better or the algorithm finally decided to be nice. feels like people overthink this stuff.