What makes a great YouTube thumbnail

you know offline you know I got a chance to look at a bunch of thumbnails and it's fascinating which ones do well which ones don't is there something you could say about what are the elements of a thumbnail that work well is this also deeply well that's where yeah it's the same thing like how do you cook good food but um it's easier if you pull up a thumbnail that could be like that's why that's good that's why that's bad that's uh like an example would be like one of my friends I was he just

uploaded a video recently and I called him I was like what is this because he's a very very smart guy and in the thumbnail he's he's getting chased by cops but the cops were wearing yellow vests so they didn't look a cop so I was like whoa why are the cops in your thumb wearing yellow vests it's like that makes it so much more boring and he was like carrying a flag but the pole and the color of the flag were the same color so it's like it's a lot harder to see the flag I

was like also you're wearing like a shirt with like five different colors like so it's like it's hard to tell what even what your outline is and then in the background there were cars and I was like well if you have cops chasing you why not make the cars cop cars and you know and it's like because in my head I'm like dang if he just did those like four or five things the video probably got like seven extra views how much iteration because I also got a chance to see the number of iterations you

do on a I don't know it's a problem now it's an addiction is it so you kind of there's a lot of the versions were really good yeah how do you know what they're like I love how you when we pulled up that uh the burger one and we were flipping through him you're like that's really good I was like oh that's version like one of like a thousand but even the sketch the idea was good like already even the original idea is strong yeah so we one of our coming up videos we made the

world's largest plant-based burger and the thumbnail we were thinking is like me standing beside the bird because it's six feet tall that's that's what he's talking about so like just picture a giant six foot tall burger super wide thousands of pounds and then I'm beside it and then it's like eating the world's largest burger like you that's just something you have to click like so you were saying like how would you describe a good thumbnail like that you know what I mean like but I think you said the one I noticed first that was good

where you were very small in it relative to the and you didn't like that one I needed to come forward a little bit and also the photo we took was uh just my upper body so they photo manipulated and created my legs Photoshop and that's why I said I didn't like it because my right leg was a little like off it was like bit the wrong way does the physics and thumbnail have to even make sense I mean you can just like exaggerate the head size and all that kind of yeah 100 yeah things don't

have to be relative yeah you can have a car in the background be three times the size yeah because yeah every one of my thumbnails my face is in the you know left side very big so brand recognition so just people know oh especially because now that a lot of people copy our videos it's just nice to like you know everyone else might make thumbnails like this but this is mine and obviously we usually over deliver and do bigger stuff