today we're going over three genius title and thumbnail strategies that could explode your views and actually revolutionize the way you think about click-through rate forever and we'll learn them from a man who's amassed over 40 billion views during his time on YouTube enjoy our conversation we think about titles and copy and thumbnails uh which is words and thumbnails in kind of three broad buckets right this would be a tease and information Gap and a value proposition a value proposition is this is what's in the video a information Gap would be the idea that someone has
a gap in information in their head right so uh something like you know why is the sky blue I don't know why is the sky blue I have to click on your video now in order to find out and a tease would be something like you won't believe what happens next now teasers have gotten far more intricate and intelligent kind of across the board but those are kind of the three buckets that we think about and kind of the place where you don't want to be is having the same one of those in the title
and in the thumbnail where you have two cheeses or two information gaps or two value propositions right kind of the best combination we've found is a tease in the thumbnail and an information Gap in the title or teasing the thumbnail and a value proposition in the title now that value proposition can be loud and intense it doesn't have to be this video is about X some of the biggest gamers in the world do a really fantastic job of having a tease in the thumbnail right and other good thumbnail Design Elements where you go what's this
video about and you read the title and you're like oh wow you know and you have to click onto it for those who want an actual way to start improving their click-through rates and getting more views like right now I'd love to get into some specific questions and the first one's relating to titles is there a particular length that you normally recommend for YouTube titles for titles specifically the link that allows you to communicate the message that you're trying to communicate with the viewer generally speaking we found viewers don't read more than five to six
words and often five to six words is only what like shows up in the various areas where a video could show up to make those first five to six words count but we have not found like shorter is better there's definitely instances of that but generally speaking though I think we're obviously both fans of testing right but how do you make sure that your tests are as accurate as possible like how do you know that your videos click-through rate went up three percent as a direct result of you swapping out that video's thumbnail and not
as a result of some other outside thing that happened at a similar time but actually had nothing to do with changing the video's thumbnail there's no way to kind of mitigate all the potential variables going on on YouTube even YouTube struggles to do that there's entire research papers just written about all the Hoops they have to jump through just to analyze their own data and make it as clean as possible Right but even then they still understand that there's inherent bias in the data right so like coming up with a totally clean test when you
know definitively one thing or another it's just not going to happen on the YouTube platform so you do the best you can and try to eliminate all the variables but you're going to understand the context of your channel and content you know better than anyone else and so is it's just important to kind of keep in mind all the potential you know variables on any sort of test you're doing and do the best you can for the small channels out there who want to test things on their Channel but don't have very much data at
the moment what sort of lens should they look at their analytics through so you know if you're a small Creator if you're doing you know less than five thousand two thousand views a month like I would say just worry about what you're seeing from an audience retention perspective and in terms of topics about what to make a video about and that sort of thing can be helpful but when you're that size I would say the more important analysis to do is just kind of a self-analysis just based on kind of like the raw view numbers
and how you're feeling about the videos beyond the kind of the retention metrics every video is going to have an asterisk next to it oh well this one because this oh that one because this like it's going to be real difficult to pull any sort of like meaningful insights out of your YouTube analytics when you're in that size spend that time doing collaborations right looking at YouTube videos for inspiration thinking about like what's something that I could do that would be interesting to viewers that maybe they never saw before like spend that time doing that
another thing you could spend your time doing is looking at other big successful YouTubers and then figuring out what are the big mistakes they made when they were small and had a channel like yours then that way you can just avoid those mistakes without even needing to look at your analytics that's why I'd suggest watching the video on screen in it I talked to a Creator who's blown up his channel but we go over the five biggest mistakes that were holding him back when his channel was small and struggling so check that video out because
there's a good chance you're making some of those mistakes on your Channel right now
