foreign I did it again I reviewed thousands and thousands of YouTube thumbnails to see what's working right now howdy howdy everyone Nate's here let me share what I found the majority of YouTube thumbnails that I found have the Primary Emotion of happy or excited coming in at 25. 3 of all the thumbnails and the least common emotion of thumbnails that I found is interestingly enough sadness coming in at just 1. 8 percent of thumbnails now where did I get that from out of the thousands of thumbnails that I reviewed I pulled a semi-random sampling of hundreds and hundreds of thumbnails and pulled these data points I selected the broad Niche that they covered on YouTube I collected the link to the video I selected whether it had a face or no face in the thumbnail then I counted the number of words present on the thumbnail as well as the number of objects present on the thumbnail after I did that I selected the Primary Emotion that I felt like that thumbnail was conveying and then I rated that thumbnail on a scale of one to five on The Branding how it related to the other thumbnails present on that channel as well as the perceived quality of the thumbnail and then finally I placed a category on that thumbnail based on the primary categories of successful thumbnails that I found after reviewing thousands of them and among all of this I found some things that I had never seen before among my years of doing this on YouTube I'm going to share them in this video okay so you want specifics so let me show you face versus no face in the thumbnail no face accounted for 24.
14 was showing a face on the thumbnail accounting for 75. 57 of all the thumbnails now this is interesting to me because we hear all the time that showing your face on thumbnails is somehow more successful versus not but I've got to wonder whether or not it's more successful because it's done more often in fact I'm going to talk more on this a little bit later on next is the word count that I found on the thumbnails the average number of words found on these successful thumbnails was 2. 2 words with the mode meaning the most commonly recurring number of words on thumbnails being actually zero and the max number of words present on any of the thumbnails I gathered being 11.
want me to keep going well I will next we found object count the amount of things that I would treat as an independent object on the thumbnail let me show you an example of how I pulled this I'm going to pick on the channel donut here and look at the thumbnail itself so when it came to Counting objects I looked at faces a section of text or an element of the thumbnail that appeared like it was meant to be a primary focus so in this thumbnail we've got a face right here two objects of text and then the object of the engine as well as the object of the vehicle so when I input the data I got a word count of two accounting for the two text boxes here and here but an object count of five accounting for the face the engine the vehicle and the two word boxes the Primary Emotion of this thumbnail was happy slash excited based on the face displayed in this thumbnail the average amount of objects I found was 3. 68 with the mode being 3 and the max being 13 objects next let's talk emotion and this was very interesting because what I did is I looked at the thumbnail primarily at a face yes but the overall guys of the thumbnail if there wasn't an immediate face telling me Oh this thumbnail is shocking or this thumbnail is I'm disgusted if a face wasn't primarily telling me that the next thing I looked at was what is the emotion trying to be portrayed by this thumbnail and the results rolled in as follows happy slash excited accounted for 25. 3 percent of all of the thumbnails neutral accounted for 25.
1 percent it was just edged out by a happy slash excited surprised or shocked accounted for 18. 2 percent annoyed slash disgust was 6. 7 afraid slash confused was 6.
4 percent angry or intense was a little bit higher at 7. 6 percent and then sadness came in at 1. 8 and finally confident or calm came in at 9.
1 percent emotion is an interesting thing because it's something that not a lot of people especially nor creators on YouTube think about but the reality is when you portray an emotion to your audience you're naturally more interesting in a thumbnail the data seems to show this from all of the videos I reviewed here now YouTube has stated in the past that they want the experience on YouTube to be a satisfying and or generally uplifting experience for audience members and it makes sense when you think about it if someone's coming to YouTube and they're just feeling depressed and down every single time they go to YouTube are they going to go to it more or less so it makes sense to me that the emotion in the majority of thumbnails and probably the content of the majority of videos on YouTube is in the happy or excited area but that doesn't mean to me that these other categories can't be successful on YouTube in fact if you account for all of these they make up more than the happy or excited category the interesting thing to me here was how few thumbnails were sad as the Primary Emotion and I think this could be attributed to the fact that most people when given the choice choose not to feel sadness in fact I believe there was a Pixar movie a while back all about this what was even crazier to me is that almost every single video that I could primarily attribute the sad emotion to was some sort of announcement about someone's life or mental health or leaving YouTube interesting now I do need to note that this data by no means represents all of the entirety of thumbnail data on YouTube though I wish that I had access to all of YouTube's data heck yeah and if anybody from YouTube is watching this video hit me up send me an email but no this is very interesting because I did my level best to find the top performing videos that were most recent from a broad variety of niches on YouTube in fact I intentionally selected only thumbnails that were published within the last year on each Channel that I looked at now the other two data points I pulled were The Branding continuity as well as the perceived quality that was purely objective on my part how quality did I think that thumbnail was and after inputting this data on so many thumbnails I realized after the fact it wasn't as applicable to the remainder of this video so maybe I'll do a video on that in the future but for now it was kind of a fail now the final area that I collected data here was in the thumbnail category and this was huge in fact it was so big I'm giving it a dedicated section of this video first however I need to address some things that were missing from this data review that I did one I did not have access to the click-through rate for these thumbnails again as much as I wish I could see the analytics on every single one of these channels I reviewed I'm guessing if I went to most of them and said hey you want to share your analytics with me they would say what the heck no so in the absence of that and also in the absence of YouTube giving me access to all of their data that I could possibly ever want I had to operate off of the next best thing and that is total views you see I've referred to it this way in the past because views seems to be a good conglomerate measure of many other metrics if these other metrics are performing well like click-through rate and average view duration Etc then the amount of views on that video seems to go up because it spreads to more people so with that what I was forced to do was look at larger more successful channels in each of these variety of niches and then filter by their most popular videos and then only select the videos that showed as one year ago or newer now I get it YouTube tends to be a bit generous in there how long ago a video was published some of these videos might have been a bit older than a year old I just needed to acknowledge that for data sincerity is that even a term data transparency maybe that's the term I'm thinking about the second thing missing from this was data from small channels or up and coming channels I did this intentionally again because I wanted to focus on what was the Leading Edge or the trending successful channels and what they were doing right now because in many cases what's being successful with the larger channels on YouTube tends to trickle down and be successful for the so-called smaller channels individual reviews of smaller channels thumbnails as well as roasting the heck out of them well that's something to look forward to in the future next thing as I was reviewing these I purposely kept the thumbnails No taller than my thumb no pun intended because in most cases I didn't want to pull up that thumbnail and have an entire screen filled with a thumbnail for me to analyze I wanted to be able to look at these thumbnails for the first impression factor and not be able to pick apart all the disparate tiny details and elements of it all right you want me to keep going well I'm going to keep going next I'm going to ask you to book the like button on this video if it is being crazy mind-blowing like it was to me and or if you want to show appreciation for the sheer amount of work and late nights that I spent Gathering all of this data either way I would love it if you booped the like button on this video thank you for doing that all right we've got categories what are these categories that you're So speaking of Nate you see as I was looking through all of these thumbnails this entire data set I started to realize that each of these thumbnails could be broadly categorized into five different areas five categories I might add that are the most successful on YouTube right now first category I'm calling the collage category let me show you here's a video from the channel Mrwho's the boss 19 toxic Tech fails that will last forever if you look at this thumbnail in fact I'll pull it up large for you what is happening here is what I would call a collage of different elements to portray something in the thumbnail let me show you another this is from the channel and mate we've got another collage here we've got 10 minutes we've got a cake and then we've got someone eating a bite of the cake so with this thumbnail you can have the cake and eat it too now collage thumbnails is what I would call the most basic or standard format of thumbnails that can still be successful on YouTube so in the case of these videos this one got 14 million views and this one got almost 700 000 views collages are distinct for the reasons that you'll see as I show you the other categories but first I wanted to tell you how common collages work I keep saying the word collage and if I say that enough time it starts sounding like collage which makes me hungry all right collage thumbnails accounted for 29. 4 percent of all of the thumbnails I found so a majority of the thumbnails were this category let me show you the other ones next let's look at the Showcase category these are thumbnails like this here we've got Eric I trapped 25 strangers in a box we got 19 million views on this but look what's Happening Here a showcase thumbnail usually has a primary thing as the name suggests that it is showcasing need another example well let me show you in case you weren't hungry already here we've got another one this is from the channel pickup limes it accounts for almost half a million views on this one look at this now you could argue that this is somewhat like a collage but I would say this is different because of a few things what is the primary focus of this thumbnail it's the food and everything is pointing to the food we're showcasing this food in fact eight ingredients down here with an arrow pointing to it also indicates that this is showcasing how delicious this food looks again it's a showcase 25. 4 percent of all the thumbnails I looked at fit into this category next we have the very interesting split frame category and I debated even making this a category and you'll see why here in a moment but this is the type of thumbnail that looks like this voila this video from crafty Panda 2.
4 million views let me show you the thumbnail split frame is distinct from showcase because it is often a showcase but it's intentionally done in more than one frame either two get this showcase more than one thing within the thumbnail or to indicate a progression of time or results so this is a Showcase of two different lock hacks let me show you another example we've got Ali abdall 5. 4 million views on this one let's look at the thumbnail it's also a split frame but this one is intentionally showing the progression of time or results before and after split frames surprisingly enough accounts for only 11. 2 percent of all of the thumbnails I collected I was going to show this thumbnail but they changed it Nathan Doan comedy their thumbnail used to look like this if you see this tiny preview here there was a single action or a movement occurring within this because it was showing 12 years remained with this download but they changed it to this so now I can't talk about it in this video I selected another one from the channel Stephen he this one's got almost a million views on it and this is what it looks like now let me explain why this becomes a single action or movement thumbnail you could say that this is a showcase it's showcasing an iPhone and it's iPhone 14 but it's crossed out in this 15.
you could say that but this is distinct from showcase because what is emphasized here the action of Crossing out the 14 and writing a 15. because it is handwritten on this the primary focus becomes a single action or a single movement let me show you another one all right we got this one I'm picking on donut again here but this video did 5. 2 million views let's look at the thumbnail here we're going in layers here because collage we've got a person holding a nail gun and they're shooting a mannequin's face collage right we've got showcase could be showcasing this nail gun but next layer deep here is the action of testing these safety goggles by shooting them with a nail gun now single action or movement videos accounted for 10.
4 percent of all of the thumbnails I found and that brings us to the fifth category which is this one we've got Matt and Abby 2. 4 million views let's look at the thumbnail what is happening in this thumbnail is we're getting a clear reaction to an event or something happening want me to keep going well here's another example this is from the coding train and again we have another reaction you see you and I most people who spend a lot of time on YouTube are very familiar with the reaction style of thumbnail but what we don't always realize is that more thumbnails are reactions than we think because the traditional reaction is Doctor reacts to horrible medical disasters and they're going ah like that kind of reaction this thumbnail is also a reaction because what's the primary focus here it's certainly not this background that's just to give context for this guy down in the corner over here and just looking at this what is the reaction here it's either oh my gosh that just happened or oh my gosh I can't believe that just happened and the reaction category of thumbnail accounts for 23.
