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[LandyVlad]

I have found a lot of useful content by Justin at Primal Video.
He's mostly focused toward helping YouTubers succeed.

(I'm not associated with them in any way).

I found this vide on how to create thumbnails, and thought it might be helpful for people here.

[Rhody Seth]

My thumbnails all over the place.  I use different text, different layouts - I haven't found a template/style that calls out to me so I treat every thumbnail as a unique creation.  It's probably not great from a promotional perspective but I plan to keep going in this direction until I get an epiphany. 

[LandyVlad]

Yep it's hard to decide on a style.

[JayZippo]

Well being random does have it's advantages.

Still remember a conversation with a guy at work. I was telling him the work it takes to make and maintain a youtube channel, I showed him. He said it looked great but "would never click on one of my thumbnails." When I asked him why, is because he doesn't like "commercial looking" thumbnails, he is on Youtube to see raw, funny, unedited things (paraphrasing).

I was like ok, never thought of that, and it wasn't a day later one of my clients said the same thing. So there is a base of people that just don't like super clean cookie cutter thumbnails.

I used to just have one thumbnail, and just change the EP# or Part# and call it a day. Then I decided to put more effort into it and change out the thumbnail for each one.

Did it help me?

Nope. Still about the same views, etc.

It's weird, so I just do what I do and try not to look into it too much. For bigger more active channels, it could change things, but for small channels, I am not sure it matters much.

[LandyVlad]

Yeah I think a channel needs a certain base of viewers in order to make any comparisons statistically significant and therefore of use.  At that point things like TubeBuddy's A/B testing  could be very useful. But for smaller channels just the experience of developing and improving ones own thumbnails (the way you think is best)is useful.

Heck depending on the channel type you could even do a video showing some alternate thumbnails and asking viewers for their opinions (and why they prefer the ones they prefer).