La boîte à idées

One of the most important aspects to whether or not your video is going to appear in search results or just generally in the youtube algorithm, is your ctr otherwise known as your click-through rate, which means you need a killer thumbnail in order to get people to click.

Your video and boost that ctr. That’S. Why today we’re going to look at your thumbnails you submitted to us and give you feedback about how you can make them more clickable for your audience. Let’S go hey, i’m Eljay with streamscheme.

com, i’m also a variety streamer over at twitch.tv/eljayem_. There are links to both those in the description. I’D really appreciate it. If you felt like checking me out, while i’m live, we’re gonna go through and give you guys feedback on your thumbnails you submitted, and at the end of this, i’m gonna completely rebuild one of your thumbnails from scratch.

Will it be yours, stay tuned in all seriousness, though, the surprising part of this video that i didn’t expect that i really don’t think you guys will expect is the fact that when we rebuild this person’s thumbnail at the end, it is so much easier and simpler To make a clickable thumbnail than what the majority of you guys are actually doing, it seems like you guys, are really over complicating it.

So hopefully, if you watch to the end, you’ll understand what i mean. I’Ve said the word thumbnail already too much that it’s lost. All meaning so, let’s get into it and by getting into it i mean get into our sponsor of today’s video skillshare.

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You want straight out of the gate. You need to think about your audience or, if you don’t have an audience set, you need to think about your key demographic. Now you need to also consider what your audience or key demographic are going to want to watch and what you can do to make them.

Click on your videos, let me give you an example: nerd or die asked me to review one of their thumbnails. When i put these submissions out – and my first thought was: oh god i can’t roast a brand and then i thought actually.

This is really well made. They’Ve done a fantastic job at making this look great and then my third thought was yeah. This isn’t very good. It doesn’t have much intent behind it. I really like you guys, but you could have done so much better.

I think the thumbnail looks fantastic, but let’s talk about intent. First, we have to ask who is nerdodye’s key demographic or who is their audience? Well, it’s streamers much like everyone watching this video.

So what do streamers want to do? What does every single streamer want? They want to grow, they want to grow their brand, they want to grow their viewership and they want to grow their socials. So if everyone wants to grow, we need to use that to our advantage.

It just says social pop-ups in the thumbnail, but if we had it say, grow your socials in big letters with maybe an arrow pointing down. We take this phone, make it a bit bigger. We point out one pop-up.

Instead, it will tell the story of the video and explain the tool if you click this video you’re, going to learn about a tool that is going to help. You grow your social media as a streamer. That is what we want to push these people, because right now, it’s kind of just explaining it’s a video about social pop-ups.

There’S no intent they’re not going to get anything out of it, which means the only people clicking it are people who already are looking for social pop-ups. My actionable tip here is that sometimes beauty doesn’t mean it’s going to be the best thumbnail.

A lot of my thumbnails graphic design, wise suck, but because they heavily appeal to their key demographic, they work and they perform so think about your user’s intent and then think about what you can do to boost that intent.

I hope that helps and i’m sorry no that i don’t mean to be harsh, but you guys asked next up a tip that i think every single person watching this should have heard me say before in my other videos, and that is that youtube thumbnails are much Smaller when you upload them than when you’re actually editing them on your big screen.

If we look at this thumbnail by benjalin i’ve just butchered your name, then you can see exactly what i mean. I think the concept is really good and can become a really solid thumbnail that intrigues people, except.

We need to refine it a bit, but this really hammers home my point about how any small elements in thumbnails just become useless. When you shrink it down, you see the text becomes almost impossible to read, so we grab this businessman beta.

Let’S make him a bit bigger, more prominent, ditch all this text that is impossible to read, because it’s so small and then it gets even harder with the yellow text blending into the background. Let’S make the stonks larger and i believe at the time of uploading this.

It was the world record for the game, which is a huge hook that isn’t being used empire at war. World record in big letters is enough to hit the key demographic of people interested. I think one of the big problems for this thumbnail is also the background.

Has a lot going on which makes it hard to focus on the elements which are also too small. We need to simplify a lot of this down, because not only will it be hard to see when it’s shrunk, but just in general, there’s too much going on.

Let’S move on to our next tip about simplicity, so you understand that thumbnails need intent and they need to be quite large because when you shrink them down, it’s really hard to see. When you put all these things together, it also means you need to really simplify what you’re doing with your thumbnails, and that brings me to my three rules of thumbnail simplification.

One. You need a clear background if your background has too much going on it’ll be very hard for people to engage and understand what is going on two. I want you to try and limit your designs to three major elements.

Visuals face text don’t put too much more in and three remove any visuals that do not help you to tell the story. If the visuals don’t help you sell what your intent is, don’t help you sell what the video is.

Ditch them if they make it confusing. Ditch them if they generally take up too much space and detract from your main concept, ditch them. I made this mistake a lot starting out and in my thumbnails today i still do it, but i’ve worked on it.

I’Ve made a few iterations of it and i’m trying to make it more simple. An example of too much being done, though, is this thumbnail by zeisskuoh i’ve butchered your name as well. I’M sorry, it seems like zai, has put a lot of time and energy into making this good they’ve put a lot of thought into it, and they’ve really considered it and that’s kind of why it’s gone wrong, because you’ve got so much going on some positive words Before i say, everything, though, is that i actually love your pitch like this play this, it is simple, it is clear.

The only problem is the rest of your thumbnail is detracting from that intent. I want to ditch the entire background for something more simple and just pick two shows with the like this next them with an arrow and then just pick two games that match the shows play this with an arrow next to them.

If you simplify it down, it’ll be a lot clearer, we could move zai up to the left and, honestly, i’d really like to see you putting more of an excited or interested or just engaging face on. I know it’s embarrassing to go full youtuber, thumbnail and full youtuber face, but it works for a reason.

Also, can i just say this: video was great. I got intrigued and wanted to see what exactly it was about. So i went and checked it out. It’S kind of like you’re walking around the park and you find a really cool stick as a kid.

That’S what this video reminded me of it was just this really nice diamond in the rough situation, so zai. If you keep making content like this focus on this style, don’t get distracted, you’ll do really well.

So simplicity is a really common problem that a lot of creators have we try and make things as engaging as possible and we tend to get carried away and add too many elements and when we add too many elements, it makes it hard for viewers to understand Exactly what the video is about in a split second, when they glance over it amongst all the other thumbnails, but then we can also have the opposite problem such as this thumbnail by equals null where you’ve gone far too simple.

The first thing i want to say is: you need to grab one of the most common ghost models that is used all the time and throw it in your thumbnail, because the truth is going back to intent as well. Most of the time when people add their own face to a thumbnail they’re doing it because they’re trying to mimic larger creators, but the reason why these people put their face as such a main focus in thumbnails is because their brand is known and their face is Known, which means people are more likely to click on it, so for phasmaphobia we need to throw our scary ghost in there on the left.

We’Re gonna move equals over to the right, since he is looking right to left. We want him looking at the ghost so people’s eyes follow where his eyes are we’re gonna ditch the words because they don’t make a reason to click and stop them for letters saying something like that can happen or first time scares, i find text to be One of the hardest elements to incorporate into a thumbnail, so let’s cover exactly how i go about trying to incorporate it and then we’ll completely rebuild someone’s thumbnail in about two minutes.

But first i want to throw it out there. If this video helps you out at all, please consider subscribing to the channel throwing us a like if you’re looking to connect with thousands of other creators, all trying to grow all doing amazing things all trying to download free overlays, then all three of those things are In our discord, which is linked in the description, feel free to go check that out, it is entirely free.

It’S a really great place. Even if you choose to leave right after you should at least check it out right. Finally, text text is incredibly difficult because it’s also subjective about whether or not you should even add it.

There are good and bad ways to add it, and there are certain videos where you just shouldn’t put text on it at all. I do education content, which usually needs a little bit of text to help round out what the story of the video is.

However, there are other videos out there where adding text is really detrimental. For example, the thumbnail at the end of this video we’re not going to use any text whatsoever to try and sell the story.

It just didn’t match and i’ll explain why in a second either way there are rules. You should always follow if you decide to push forward and use text in your thumbnail, let’s take a look at devil rain and yes, i’ve butchered another username and his thumbnail.

While i go through these rules, you’re going to want to use large words that stand out from your background easily don’t use thin fonts use thick, easily readable fonts. I recommend using four words or less as well, so it isn’t hard to read at a glance make sure these four words are additive, meaning they don’t just repeat the title.

They add more reason to click. If we look at my slobs versus obs video, i could have just written slobs versus obs, like everyone else who made these videos. But i went for time to switch in big letters with a hard black drop shadow behind it, and i also made the switch red to help catch the eye of potential viewers.

I’Ll show you guys how to do these two things when i rebuild someone else’s thumbnail in a second, then the arrow from text to obs draws the eye and sells the story of oh hey, he’s switching to obs, whatever you choose for text make sure it is Very direct i make this mistake all the time where i try and add something for the text, but it isn’t direct or precise enough.

So now we need to look at devil, rain’s, thumbnail properly, with all this in mind, and we can kind of see where he goes wrong. All of the text is too small. There are too many words and because the font is a thin font.

When you add this white stroke and the drop shadow to stand out, it actually makes it harder to read, which is interesting, because normally drop shadows and strokes actually help things stand out, but everything i’ve talked about today in this video all of the feedback.

I’Ve. Given you guys is very easily fixed and the fact is a lot of you guys are beginners, we all start somewhere, i’m not going to show you the thumbnails i made before this youtube channel because i’m trying to be an authority in the subject.

So, let’s put everything into action and rebuild another one of benja’s thumbnails. The reason i chose this one was because i think it really incorporated every mistake that i’ve talked about in this video.

I’M sorry ben and i think i had a really good concept about how i could improve it and simplify it. Avengers new video was about how he’d built a bot for twitch chat to control, captain quark inside ratchet and clank.

So that was the story we needed to tell. If we look at this thumbnail, you can really tell that everything i’ve covered in today’s video has gone wrong. There are too many elements they’re all too small.

The text in twitch chat is unreadable because of that and the story is confusing as to what is going on. So, let’s simplify it and yes i’ll be using photoshop, but any photo editing. Software will have everything i do in this video available for you to use.

So, let’s switch over to photoshop and get into simplifying this down. First, we need to pick three elements we want to use. Our intent is to tell the story of chat, controlled, quark, aka chat, controlled game, so we need twitch chat and it needs to be visibly sending commands or controls that look like a gamepad controls.

Let’S grab the chat and drop it on the left hand side over here and let’s zoom in so people can see the control commands. If we think about our key demographic, they should be familiar with chat, controlled games.

Ever since twitch played pokemon and everything like that happened now we need quark or something from ratchet and clank. Let’S get a high res image that won’t look bad in 1920×1080 thumbnail. Just because you guys are using a ps2 emulator doesn’t mean you should use a ps2 emulator in your thumbnail.

Go high res it’ll be better for clicks and it isn’t lying. Don’T worry, we’re going to scale up our new high-res quark and then we’re going to use this quick select mask to make a cutout of him. Essentially we’re just selecting him and removing the background, but because i actually like the background.

What i’m going to do is i’m going to right click duplicate layer, so it stays in the exact same spot and then i’m going to remove the mask from the lower layer to add the background back in this gives us a quark on top, and it also Gives us a background and quark below him? I then put the duplicated layer underneath the chat layer and because we’ve now duplicated it, it means the cutout is still above chat, which means his fingers are also above chat.

This adds depth to the image. To help add further depth, i’m going to add an outer glow just to his cutout it’ll, make his fingers stand out well against the black background of the chat. Another tough part is connecting the two story elements.

We have the chat here. That has controls and we have the character we’re going to be controlling. I tried using text but couldn’t find a nice hook. I tried things like chat controlled or this controls this, but at the end of the day i really liked the current design and any text seemed to distract from it.

So i went with an arrow with a hard drop shadow and some red to point from chat controls to quark. It also helps add a little bit more eye catching to this section in the middle here. That said, it just wasn’t popping enough for me yet so i go down here and i add a brightness and contrast layer for the entire comp and then i up the brightness and contrast just slightly not too much because it’ll become gross, but just enough to help The entire image pop and stand out the final step and the most important step of this entire thing shrink it down and see how it looks when it’s much smaller bosh.

I am very happy with this and i really think it sells the story now. In fact, benj is now using this exact thumbnail that i made for him so clearly he’s happy with it too, and now the most important part of this video that you guys always forget to do.

I need you to comment down below kapow, because that is our 100 crew code word go confuse everyone else and i’ll make sure to give you guys your 100 crew badge. I appreciate you watching this. I hope it helped you out.

Thank you so much for everyone who submitted their thumbnails anyway. I will see you guys next week. Thank you so much for watching bye,