The billion dollar YouTube question is: 

What makes people click? 

The best thumbnail advice I’ve ever heard is that if you wanna be better at thumbnails, pay attention to the thumbnails that make you click. In fact, if you’d like to save some money, instead of hiring us, spend the next year noticing what makes you click on a video. And then try to replicate that. 

Even though thumbnails are a relatively new problem, it all comes down to some basic psychology that’s been around forever- theory of mind. AKA

what goes through stranger’s heads as they scroll past a thumbnail? 

What does the thumbnail make them think, or feel, or wonder about? 

Or does the thumbnail do none of those things- does it make people keep scrolling and ignore it?

Let’s look at an example: 

All right what did I see? 

  • Mr. Beast

  • A Wolf 

  • Ryan Trahan

It makes sense that someone would click on Mr. Beast or Ryan Trahan. 

But that doesn’t do much for us since we’re trying to create thumbnails that grow channels, and both of those famous person thumbnails got clicked on because of the famous youtubers in them. 

But what about that middle thumbnail- the wolf? 

What happened in the mind of 19 million people that they were compelled to click? 

Actually, asking what happens in ‘the mind’ is the wrong way to think about it. 

It’s what happens in their body. 

(and then their mind…) 

Eyes: Made me look

The first thing a thumbnail has to do is: stand out from the scroll. It has to catch people’s eyes. Sounds pretty simple, but in the crowded Times Square of a YouTube scroll, this is actually pretty difficult. 

There’s a bunch of ways to stand out from the scroll but let’s just talk about the wolf for now- why does that thumbnail stand out from the scroll? 

Well it’s pretty minimal, so it looks different from the other videos around it. 

It’s also a real, unedited photo which is rare on YouTube.  

Gut: Made me feel

That ‘gut’ or ‘lizard’ part of your brain is always trying to keep you alive. So when you see a wolf looking right at you, it’s soooo biologically important to us that we can’t help but notice because it engages our survival mode. Of the 7 criteria that interests humans, survival is the most fundamental, but all thumbnails that get clicked on will tap into one of those levels. 

Frontal Lobe: Made me think

Okay so at this point the thumbnail has stopped the scroll and the person is actually looking at it. But it still has to make you click. And one of the main reasons people will click is because the thumbnail created questions that they want answered. 

This thumbnail is a classic “cliffhanger” thumbnail- where the thumbnail shows a scene from the video at a threshold point- and the question a cliffhanger always makes you ask is: What’s going to happen next? What will the wolf do? What will the person taking the picture do? The only way to answer those questions is to watch the video. 

So back to the billion dollar question- what makes people interested enough to click? 

The shortest answer to that question is: 

People are interested in stuff that benefits them.