Thumbnail Hacks YouTubers Use To Hook You

been if you discovered that the reason you click on a YouTube video wasn't actually your choice but that YouTubers were hacking your brain in a way that forced you to click and the reason they have to do this is because if you don't click they could lose out on millions of dollars in adorable so in this video I'm going to reveal the astonishing tactics they use to do this and we're going to reveal numerous instances of them employing their clickbait strategy we'll even try to recreate Marquess brownlee's first ever YouTube thumbnail to show what it

takes to get it to their now modern day standard but that's not all we're then going to send our remade thumbnail with three of Mark s brownlee's newer ones to a group of full-time YouTubers fins are a pro editor with an insane eye for detail Leela an incredibly talented video production expert and hey Dominic YouTube's leading Instagram Pro who literally teaches people how to make eye-catching images for a living and if they guess ours is the Imposter James here has to get his ear pierced what would your kids think if you're on an ear piercing

they'd be pulling on it and making the hole really big okay we definitely need to get this right then so for those of you don't know who Marcus is he is a YouTube Legend he's been on the platform forever and the length he goes to just to make his videos and his thumbnail images will shock you but this level of perfectionism helps him to get billions of views and made him one of the most respected Tech influences in the world the thing that makes YouTube so weird though is well it makes sense why this image

would get your attention it is beautiful but how does this one get as many views when it's so ugly no offense whoever made that well this is one of the first and most powerful hacks YouTubers use that force you to click because they know thumbnails are not all about pretty design Oh No in fact 80 maybe even 90 of the power they use to get you to click is about working out what will interest you on a deeper psychological level as fast as they flip in can and to do that many spend hours maybe even

days trying to find a small smart way to create a particular feeling in your brain the second you see it this feeling the obsess over is the difference between thousands or millions of views and that feeling is is Intrigue others call it curiosity you could even argue it's fomo this ugly image therefore is not a rush job it's a giant psychological mine hack designed to make you feel something that makes you not just want to but need to click to confirm something about yourself back at the studio I was giving James the bad news that

the Marcus thumbnail we had to remake was about a remote control for a laptop what yeah how can we make that one of his new ones and have it not cooled out as being an imposter I mean we don't even have the product that is where you were wrong because I actually had this weird laptop and the remote and it's in my attic so should we go and get it you can stay here if you want all right I will okay good luck on your adventure in my attic I thought through the dust and the

spiders and came across some mysterious items before I saw the corner of the laptop sticking out and was ready to go back to the studio with its very remote so how do top YouTubers come up with an image with so much Intrigue in it you are unable to resist clicking it when it's down to a few things first YouTubers will spend a lot of time researching to find find inspiration for their image idea now that inspiration it could come from anywhere however they often turn to other YouTubers thumbnails or sometimes even film posters have elements

in them they can borrow even those weird ads on the bottom of blog posts are a Minefield for ad Revenue generating thumbnails but when they have that inspiration YouTubers then spend a massive amount of time brainstorming and creating multiple Concepts that could help to generate that desired feeling but this doesn't stop there though the top YouTubers Mega hack and even channels without millions of subscribers have these things called think tanks so basically they hire four to five people to come up with four to five different images for each video they make and then each member

of the think tank will present their idea and the thumbnail that gets picked can win the designer a bonus now that might seem like Overkill but so much time and effort goes into their videos they cannot risk not having it click on a much smaller scale though even the YouTubers who are starting out or have less than six figure subscriber counts have realized just how important getting a click is so the history training communities to give each other help and feedback on their images because going it alone is almost a guaranteed recipe for failure then

what YouTubers do is going to seem borderline insanity but they take multiple versions of their winning concept not just two or three but they make 20 of the same image with tiny tweaks now some of you might not even be able to spot the difference between the images they make this example here from the Fantastic Mike Shake used a slightly brighter or slightly darker background with slightly different words and lots of different font sizes and then what it does is when he launches the video he'll switch between the different images to establish which slight variation

brings in more of your views in the studio things we're looking up for James's ears as we stumbled across something that might make it harder for pro YouTubers to guess our weird remote thumbnail thingy was the Imposter so Marcus's most viewed video is about a Game Boy and it was part of this retro Tech series what that means is we can potentially get away with this inner thumbnail and not look like an imposter if we mix in some of the Retro Tech images with the thumbnails that we send to the YouTubers feeling better about your

ears yeah yeah you know what they say here today gone tomorrow you're not going to cut them off like all right so the big question right now is how do we make this look like one of Marcus's new thumbnails whilst that's going on I'm going to use the next powerful strategy YouTubers use that force you to click and you can see it right now don't adjust your screen that's it this Yellow Block is a thumbnail they've got millions and millions of views because it harnesses this trick and so did this one from veritasium now the

reason these work is because the thumbnail challenges your beliefs and when we are challenged in this way the feeling of being potentially lied to is so strong we are compelled to click so this hack is to go against the grain of what viewers believe and it is very powerful back in the real world we entered our brainstorming stage to try and make the old remote look as sexy as one of marquez's more recent images uh can we finish all that out do we just try and take a picture of just this or do we work

with this oh no this is your job I know so your ears at stake so go figure that out heavily inspired by our research James set out to draw up some drafts of thumbnails like one of his French girls whilst I generally just got in the way and in the hope he would end up having his ears pierced there's a rocket if you leave your work unattended with a pen in the UK this is what happens despite my rocket James drops some amazing looking thumbnail ideas and that meant the next step was to start producing

one thing Marcus Brownlee has is the best kid in the world and I'm giant team to make these images I'm lucky enough to have this guy he's actually a photographer professional one and now he draws thumbnails for me for a living but if you don't have a James or a Marcus Brownlee team does that mean you can't make amazing thumbnails like Marquez anymore well no because there's actually another Hack That YouTubers use that force you to click that generates billions of views and it requires them to take no photos at all Chris Brown command are

the masters of this they get millions of views because instead of taking photos of themselves they use images of famous people you actually want to click on instead I mean this peaky blinders one is genius because they released it when the show was trending so it's a double whammy of clickability but wait a second is this video actually about that celebrity and that's the thing this one is but a lot of the time you'll see things in YouTube as thumbnails the video is not 100 about which is clickbait right well yes and no because the

top YouTubers have a simple strategy that stops you feeling betrayed once you start watching and all they do is simply include whatever or whoever it is in the thumbnail in the opening scene of the video and you're going to start to notice this all of the time now you might find that thing or person never actually gets shown again here Chris Brown command undoes The Click bait by including Russell Brand in the intro and then the opening section of the video but after that it's not about him at all but you definitely don't feel cheated

this whole video would have been designed to get your attention first with the most clickable person they could think of for the topic being featured in the thumbnail and then they would have written the content based around it so it's not clickbait back in the studio James was in his element but I was Googling the best ear piercing studios in town because having seen this weird remote thingy I didn't think he stood a chance now you're probably thinking to yourself how on Earth could anyone compete with Marcus branley look at all the kit they're using

just try and recreate one of his images for the tricks I've shown you so far enable all kinds of creators to get millions of views however this is only half of what's going on the second half is where this all gets turbocharged with some crazy computer trickery so the highest contrast you'll ever get in an image is black and white and the more contrast something has the more likely it is that that thing will stick out now the top YouTubers in the world establish what the most clickable thing is to their viewer and then they

use colors and shading to ensure that that thing gets your attention fast and of course it doesn't stop there they'll use software like this one they'll put their image in and then they'll get an AI generated heat map which will model the highest point of interest for the viewers this means they can get a really clear picture of if the thing they wanted to stick out does in a minute I'm going to show you how they then use this to help pick a winning thumbnail because it's flipping mind-blowing but let's get back to the studio

where things were not going as planned got some bad news James and viewers I know you've been enjoying the Goonies theme but it's really hurting my nipples this t-shirt so I'm sadly going to have to sing bye to the Superman t-shirt so it turns out taking a photo of an old laptop remote with its battered old laptop is not very easy that looks awful that is not what we want in fact even if the laptop wasn't smashed up get him photos of it to look as slick as Marquez brownlees was a massive challenge I mean

you'd think Marquez was just taking a simple photo but to get anywhere close we had to use a giant light a rig for the camera to keep it steady another laptop that monitor the photos and take them and even with all this kit it was going to be very hard to hide the broken screen and because I didn't have much to do whilst James did all the hard work I got bored and ended up drawing another rocket you drew a dick on it bringing us to the next thumbnail trick YouTubers use and I really think

this one will surprise you so we know you need Intrigue and we want to use contrast to make things pop can I get away with that but there's another design hack that the top YouTubers are using and it levels this up even more so look at these three thumbnails they all have something in common can you see it well there might be a few things but the answer I really wanted was this now this isn't a set in stone rule but to play it safe when using colors many YouTubers only tend to use three in

their images like I said not a set in stone rule but bear with me so what this does is keep the thumbnail super clean and then it allows for that point of contrast to pop did it again stop doing that in fact you'll find a lot of the time they'll change the colors of their clothing in Photoshop to match other elements in the image to stop them taking too much attention away from the thing that they really want you to see but this is where it goes next level so let's take this image of Wonder

Woman Michelle who spent time being a garbage collector watch this if I make her hoodie a different color it doesn't work the initial's dirty and less appealing she doesn't stick out as much but that's not it this green of the garbage truck that's not real either it looks more like this in real life in fact there's a strong chance this photo was taken in a studio and everything else was started after so the YouTubers are manipulating every color in their image to ensure one the right part sticks out first to get your attention and great

entry two the colors work together as a team so they are often part of a color palette James has finished doing the production and now it's time to photoshop and by now it's time to photoshop I mean that's time for you to go and Photoshop it don't get your ear pierced James because we have we have a zero piercing policy at film Booth you'll lose your job how do you like those steaks yeah still giggling fine whatever I love losing job for our first thumbnail I had to start by removing Ed's rocket then I played

it out with the image inside of Photoshop to make it look as Mark as like as possible the second image was tougher as the laptop was so obviously broken so I tried to keep things as simple as possible and ended up finding a solution that worked hopefully well enough to keep my ears safe James you are not getting your ears pierced with the images ready I moved on to harnessing the next trick YouTubers use that force you to click I think this is one of the most powerful steps in thumbnail Creation Day so what I'm

going to do is I'm going to put it into thumbs up.tv and I'm going to give it a title and then we'll see what it looks like on the home page and I'm going to screenshot that and then I'm going to drop it into my feedback Community called funnel University and I'm going to wait for the Legends in there to point out anything they don't like about it or any reasons they might not click and hopefully they are all going to pick us a winner but also I'm gonna drop this into something called Creator ml

so check this out this is going to use AI to work out which title and thumbnail combo is more likely to get views you know what it's pretty crazy how accurate it is we had two clear thumbnail and title Styles win the votes in the community feedback group and what was really interesting to see was that the AI picked pretty much the same title and thumbnail as its winner too the thing is there was a split decision between the red and the purple design but the AI had gone all in on the purple so we

decided that we would too and thanks to feedback from David here when he stated that Chromebook worked better than the word laptop and I agreed with that too this was the Imposter we landed on so now what I'm gonna do is we're going to put our image onto a board with three other Marcus Brownlee thumbnails and I'm going to send them to my YouTube buddies to see if James has to get his ear pierced or not the question is could you spot the Imposter [Music] foreign who spends his life tweaking subtle details so he'd spot

even the slightest mistake okay which one do you think definitely Mark s made um bottom left the Chromebook accessory one and then you definitely think that we made I don't know I don't know this is the thing like I think it's got to be the iPad one actually you want to know which one we made at the bottom left did you make the bottom left one oh yeah that's so good one nailed to James next I asked Leela who is so good at production and all things Adobe they literally hire her to make their promos

and tutorials so she is a true professional but I also asked hey Dom king of Instagram content on YouTube it's his job to help make images that get noticed so getting past both of these two would be a complete Miracle James the results are in all they know I've got some bad news for you but because Lena said this here's the thing I think the one that you made is the iPad no we made the purple one the one that I thought was definitely his yeah and said this you made the the bottom right one

last chance to change I'm gonna change it I'll take the the top left one so do you want me to tell you which one we made yes please the purple one oh gosh really I I didn't expect this one because I'm like this is so clear this is so perfect you know I've had to call it ear piercing people yeah and let them know that we need to cancel the appointment that's good news though how you feeling oh God yeah that's a relief my wife will be very very pleased about that I mean I was

looking forward to having like a dangling dangling crucifix this was supposed to be something bad all right what's your deepest darkest there it would have to be shaving my head okay next time we're shaving your head now you don't be thinking yourself this is an insane amount of work to put into just one thumbnail but the truth is getting a click has become so competitive YouTube is now a game of working out an image to make that people will click on then working out what video you can fit into that and we've not even spoken

about writing or editing or filming there's a ton more sneaky tricks YouTubers are using to hook you so watch this video next because you'll learn how they're editing to keep you hooked from the start to the end how has it got to the stage where I turn up just like this and you don't even say anything I've seen you wear many of them didn't even flinch thank you