10x Your Thumbnails in 60 minutes
Thick Skinned Thumbnail critiques are a 60 minute consultation where we overhaul your thumbnails. We’ll give you an analysis of what you’re doing right and what’s holding back your channel from getting the views it deserves. You’ll walk away with a simple, 1 page strategy that will meaningfully drive more views and more conversions in your business.
Unlike other thumbnail services this isn't about teaching you how to use Photoshop or how to make the perfect Mr. Beast face. It's about giving you a strategy- grounded in psychology and persuasive marketing- so that when your graphic designer hands you a thumbnail you can look at it and immediately know whether it's the right direction or not. You’ll leave with a clear understanding of how to attract the audience that you deserve.
People have to know your video exists, before it can change their life
Thumbnail Case Study 1:
The Power of a Thumbnail:
All YouTubers have the same 7 Thumbnail problems:
1. Why is nobody clicking on my thumbnails?
2. How do I condense the complexity of my video into a frame?
3. Why did that 1 video get 100,000s of views but when I used a similar thumbnail it only got 2400 views?
4. Am I really supposed to make a Mr. Beast face as an adult?
5. People keep talking about the algorithm. What’s up with that?
6. How do I make sure my thumbnails get seen by the right people?
7. Why do some youtubers just put their face in the thumbnail and get views?
The view count tells you that people didn't click, the real question is why?
There are 3 killers of great thumbnails.
Killer #1:
Copying what other YouTubers do.
Your graphic designer copied Ali Abdaal’s thumbnail perfectly. But he got 600,000 views and you got 6,000. Here’s the rub: the thumbnails that grow a channel are not the same as the thumbnails that sustain a channel once it’s found it’s audience. It’s not wrong to copy, but you won’t get the right results by copying the wrong thumbnails.
Killer #2:
Thinking social media is
luck.
You made a banger video and it got 100,000s views. Nice. A few months later you decide to use a similar thumbnail again. This time it only gets 2000 views. ‘I guess I just got lucky the first time’ you say. Wrong. ‘That’s the mysterious algorithm’ you say. Wrong. Success on YouTube is never luck. It might be success that you don’t understand yet, but it’s never luck.
Killer #3:
Leaving the thumbnail
till last.
You made a video you actually think is good. It is good. Then you remember- you need a thumbnail. But you’ve already made the video- now it’s even harder to come up with a good thumbnail because you’ve painted yourself into a corner. Our thumbnail strategy will make sure that one of the most important things doesn't become the most forgotten thing.
Thumbnail Case Study 2:
How to Stand out from the Scroll:
Stop leaving Thumbnails up to your Graphic Designer.
The biggest problem isn’t that nobody clicks on the thumbnail (although that is a problem). The biggest problem is- you don’t know how to tell your graphic designer HOW to fix the thumbnail that no one is clicking on. You don’t know Photoshop. You don’t even want to know Photoshop- that's why you hired a thumbnail designer in the 1st place.
Thick Skinned Thumbnail Critiques solves this: you’ll walk away with templates that you can pass along to your designer, a checklist to go through if the thumbnail isn’t performing like it should, and the first principles of what makes people click.
By the end of the consult, you’ll be fluent in ‘Thumbnail language’ so that you can tell your thumbnail designer what you want and what isn’t working.
Thumbnail Case Study 3:
The Biggest Thumbnail Mistake people make.
It doesn't matter if you hire the Leonardo da Vinci of graphic designers.
Or the Don Draper of creative directors.
Nobody's going to care about the success of your channel as much as you. Which means nobody’s going to care about your thumbnails as much as you do.
That doesn’t mean you have to become a Photoshop wizard.
But if you want to grow your channel, the key is to better understand thumbnails.
about us
This doesn’t deserve a section. Because we’re tiny. How tiny? The person writing this copy is ½ of the team. But here’s the TLDR.
Craig is an organic chemist turned YouTube strategist. The thing that made him suck at school (dyslexia) made him a visual machine in chemistry. Mix that with a love for movies and psychology and you get a natural instinct for reading thumbnails- what scenes do they create and who do they attract.
Anna is a business owner turned YouTuber- during the pandemic she started working on her first ever YouTube video. It went viral, it hit the Reddit home page and got 40,000 upvotes in a couple days. She got 12,000 subscribers overnight. Her life was changed forever and she’s never turned back.