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June 15thThe argument in one line.
Viral thumbnails are rarely invented from scratch; they come from studying proven outliers, understanding exactly why each one stopped the scroll, and remixing its elements or composition into your own niche.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A YouTuber who has decent video ideas but keeps watching them stall because the thumbnail does not earn the click.
- A thumbnail designer or editor who wants a repeatable research process instead of staring at a blank Photoshop canvas.
- A channel owner with a back catalog of good videos who suspects a few of them deserve a second shot with new packaging.
- An education or entertainment creator who wants a clear rule for what a thumbnail should show versus hold back.
SKIP IF…
- You want Photoshop or Canva design technique; this is about concept and strategy, not editing skills.
- You only make short-form vertical content where thumbnails barely factor into discovery.
- You want an unbiased take; the hosts sell a thumbnail research tool and run two ad reads for it.
The full version, fast.
Most thumbnails fail because creators invent them from nothing instead of borrowing from what already works. The system has four phases. First, collect inspiration: sketch from a blank page, search your interest topic and its sister and cousin topics, search your title format, and browse broadly outside YouTube. Second, test each find: did the thumbnail itself drive the views, does it hit fear, intrigue or desire, and what breaks the pattern (color, composition, novelty, text, or a recognizable face or object)? Third, remix it by keeping or swapping the elements and the composition, checked against best practices like three elements max and fifth-grade text. Fourth, keep testing, because a thumbnail swap months later can multiply views.
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00:00 – 00:57
01 · Cold open
One thumbnail change can turn a flop into millions of views; the promise of a repeatable system for any niche.
00:58 – 03:55
02 · Blank page and interest topics
Sketch from nothing first, then search your interest topic, sister topics and cousin topics using a family tree.
03:56 – 04:59
03 · Sponsor: 1of10 tool
Ad read for the 1of10 outlier and thumbnail generator tool with a discount code.
05:00 – 10:40
04 · Research rules, title format and broad research
Four rules for picking inspiration, searching by title format, and five ways to research broadly including a personal thumbnail dump.
10:40 – 16:15
05 · Why the inspiration worked
A three-question checklist: did the thumbnail drive the views, which attention pillar does it hit, and what breaks the pattern. Fear examples.
16:16 – 21:43
06 · Intrigue and desire examples
Case studies for intrigue and desire, ending with the rule that education sells the result and entertainment sells the process.
21:44 – 29:24
07 · Remixing inspiration into a concept
A matrix for remixing: same or different elements, same or different composition, inside your niche or borrowed from another.
29:24 – 41:16
08 · Best practices checklist
Fifteen checks from three elements max and readable text to viral vectors, authority and negative data, with an agency pitch in the middle.
41:16 – 45:31
09 · Keep testing
Real thumbnail swaps that lifted stalled videos, which back-catalog videos to retest first, and the closing call to action.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Education thumbnails should sell the result to make people curious about the process, while entertainment thumbnails sell the process to make people curious about the payoff.
- Every scroll-stopping thumbnail breaks a pattern through one of five levers: color, composition, novelty, text, or a recognizable person or object.
- Thumbnails that work tap one of three attention pillars: fear of a loss, intrigue around an interest topic, or desire for an ideal outcome.
- When researching inspiration, climb to the parent topic: a sword video can borrow from thumbnails about axes, knives, and guns because they share the same audience logic.
- A video that sat at 100K views for six months gained about 2 million more after nothing changed but its thumbnail.
- Look for both the biggest outliers and the highest-view videos, because a huge video can have a modest outlier score and still prove a concept can go viral.
- Always check for examples from the last six months; a thumbnail concept that has been copied across every niche stops working even if its old data looks great.
- Elements are the things inside a thumbnail and composition is how they are arranged; you can remix by changing either one, both, or the niche entirely.
- Keep a thumbnail dump: save every thumbnail you like as you browse so you have a library of concepts when the next video needs one.
- Never put key text or objects in the bottom right corner, because the duration stamp covers it on every device.
- Showing the payoff in the thumbnail kills the reason to watch; a challenge thumbnail of the creator already celebrating the win removes the suspense.
- A thumbnail that attracts the wrong people is worse than one nobody clicks, because those viewers leave fast and hurt retention.
- High-quality image assets lower the viewer's barrier to clicking because people assume a polished thumbnail means a polished video.
- The best back-catalog videos to retest are your most popular ones and the ones with your highest retention but low click-through.
- Make at least three thumbnail concepts per video so there is something ready to swap in if the first one flops.
Great thumbnails are borrowed, dissected, then remixed
WHAT TO LEARN
The fastest path to a thumbnail people click is to collect proven outliers, understand which emotion and pattern break made each one work, and rebuild it for your own idea.
02Blank page and interest topics
- Start with a rough sketch from a blank page so you know which elements matter before research biases you toward someone else's layout.
- Climb from your topic to its parent category; thumbnails about axes or knives can solve a sword video because the audience reacts to the same things.
04Research rules, title format and broad research
- Filter inspiration by your content type, the biggest outliers, the highest raw views, and at least some examples from the last six months.
- Search by title format as well as topic, then strip the format to its core idea, such as comparison, and research that broader category.
- Keep a running thumbnail dump of anything that catches your eye, so new concepts start from a library instead of a blank screen.
05Why the inspiration worked
- Before copying a thumbnail, confirm it actually drove the views by finding the same composition working on several other videos.
- Name which attention pillar it uses (fear, intrigue or desire) and which lever breaks the pattern: color, composition, novelty, text, or a recognizable face.
- Fear only works if your specific audience feels the threat; an autism thumbnail lands with parents and means nothing to viewers without kids.
06Intrigue and desire examples
- Education thumbnails should show the result, like a before-and-after transformation, while entertainment thumbnails show the process and hide the payoff.
07Remixing inspiration into a concept
- Separate elements (what is shown) from composition (how it is arranged), then decide which to keep and which to swap for your video.
- Borrowing a composition from a different niche, like the tech habit of holding a product toward the camera, often produces the most original-looking result.
08Best practices checklist
- Cap a thumbnail at about three big elements with fifth-grade text, high contrast, and nothing important in the bottom right where the timestamp sits.
- Match the mood and depth of the video so the right people click; attracting the wrong viewers hurts more than attracting none.
- Drop any concept with negative data, meaning it has been copied so widely that nothing using it has broken out in the past six months.
09Keep testing
- Prepare at least three concepts per video and swap the thumbnail on flops, since one change lifted a stalled video from 100K to over 2 million views.
- Retest your most popular videos first, then the ones with your best retention but weak click-through, because those ideas are already proven.
Terms worth knowing.
- Outlier
- A video that got far more views than its channel normally gets. Outlier scores like 2.4x or 6.9x show how many times above the channel's average a video performed.
- Interest topic
- The core subject a video is about, such as swords or energy drinks. Thumbnail research starts by searching for outliers on that subject.
- Sister and cousin topics
- Related subjects found by climbing to a parent category. For swords, sister topics are axes, knives and guns; cousin topics are more distant, like named swords from games or anime.
- Elements
- The individual things shown inside a thumbnail, such as a person, a product, a background, or a piece of text.
- Composition
- How the elements are arranged in the frame, for example a 50-50 split screen or a product held toward the camera with the person behind it.
- Viral vector
- A recognizable element many people instantly respond to, like a Lamborghini, a celebrity chef, or striking eyes, that widens who stops to look at a thumbnail.
- Pattern break
- Anything that makes a thumbnail look different from the surrounding feed, such as an unusual color, an odd shape, or a strange object, so the eye stops on it.
- Curiosity gap
- The gap between what a thumbnail shows and what the viewer wants to know. The click happens because the viewer wants to close it.
- AVD
- Average view duration: how long viewers watch on average. A good thumbnail should attract people who will actually stay, not only people who click.
- Thumbnail dump
- A personal saved collection of thumbnails you liked, kept in one place so you can browse proven concepts when designing a new one.
Things they pointed at.
13:00channelRyan Trahan, 50 States in 50 Days (Vermont thumbnail)
16:26channelWill Tennyson, The World's Most Expensive Gym Membership
17:49channelCallaway, Social Media Is About to Change Forever
19:00channelAli Abdaal, How to Stop Wasting Your Life
25:40channelMike Shake sword thumbnail
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“A simple thumbnail change could be the difference between a video becoming a flop to getting millions of views.”
20:50
“In education content you generally sell the result to get people interested in the process, and in entertainment content you sell the process to get people interested in the result.”
33:05
“The worst case scenario is that you get the wrong people. You either get no one to click or you get the wrong people to click who then leave.”
41:35
“It was stuck at 100K views and got 2 million more views just because of one thumbnail change.”
28:20
“There's billions of them, so the chances are the composition you're looking for has been done somewhere else.”
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
So a simple thumbnail change could be the difference between a video becoming a flop to getting millions of views. Look at this one that got over 90 million views because of one simple thumbnail change. And so after helping over 100 YouTubers master their thumbnails and get billions of views, one thing is very clear, and that is so many viral ideas are held back because of bad thumbnail design.
And so to prevent that, we built a system that helps you come up with viral thumbnails consistently, thumbnails that people actually click on. And the best part? This system works for any channel in any niche, even if you're starting from zero.
So you won't have to spend another second worrying about what your next thumbnail might be. So yeah, once you have your idea, you've got to find the right thumbnail for people to click, right? So we have four steps here to find the right inspiration.
So we can get into it. So first off, what is it? Yeah, so I mean, you could break it down into four steps.
So if we quickly riff off like what the steps are, let me go into a bit more detail about basically like how you can find inspiration from those. So first you have blank inspiration with nothing then we have interest topic thumbnail research And you can research based off the idea title format and then finally we have broad research So we start with the blank inspiration with nothing This is like a really good place to start when you first start brainstorming thumbnails Basically just brainstorm as many different ways as you can show the elements Do you want to show in the thumbnail?
And you might end up with like a sketch like something like this and it's something you'll generally get better at the more you practice it It's just a good thought exercise to get started and get some initial inspiration before getting deep into the analysis. So in this step, you really want to figure out what elements you want to show in the thumbnail, the layout of how these elements will combine together, and then how you get the concept of the video across, essentially.
And you can also use the one of 10 thumbnail generator to kind of get some random inspiration here as well. Yeah, so there's three main ones here. Is there anything you wanted to go into specifically?
But yeah, the first one is obviously that you want to search the interest topics. So for example, we've got sword. So you want to search sword thumbnails or sword videos and then come up with any other thumbnail outliers you can take inspiration from.
Obviously, this will mean looking inside your channel in your niche. Maybe even outside niche, like you can look at like anime stuff as well. Obviously, there's a lot of swords in there.
You can look at films and everything like that too. So then we've got number two, you can search what we call the sister interest topics. So the sister interest topics are essentially things that are going to be affiliated with your interest topic.
But I like, you know, coincide with them. So for example, we've got with a sword it'd be axe knife or gun obviously weapons and everything um so to find these you need to you need to go to the parent level as we've got here which is wellons which is the parent to axe knife gun and sword um and then you want to look at all of those as well and see if there's say for example there's a video of someone using an axe but you're using a sword as the interest topic there's going to be really good overlap of um like a thumbnail concept from the axe that you can use the sword and then we've got a cousin so this is more distant stuff so we've got like you can use things to inspire your sword idea with things that are gonna have uh like relevant personalities to the sword so like we've got a you can see there's like buster sword energy sword it's like other items are gonna have uh similar um similarities to it essentially Okay, then you've got the idea title format that you've got to research the thumbnail on.
So this would be like if you have $1 versus $100 ,000 is like the basic idea. Then you can start by searching for basically other outlier videos that use the same format. And then you can also go a step further and basically break your format down into like what's the core thing that this format is doing.
And in this example, it would be like comparison videos. So you can just search more broadly for like other comparison videos. using tools like one of 10 or just on YouTube.
just to get some inspiration for potentially the best way to tell that story in a thumbnail. And that's why we built 1of10 .com, a tool that helps creators like you do the same but 100 times easier. The tool helps you find viral video ideas already working in your niche.
It then analyzes the millions of outliers in the database to help you generate your titles and thumbnails that match your channel. For example, it can create thumbnails in the style of Beluga or even create variations of thumbnails from just a title. And this works in any niche.
No more wasting hours brainstorming concepts. and designing on Canva. And one creator even used one of 10 to combine a viral idea with a high -performing thumbnail concept.
The result, her most viewed video ever with over 2 million views. And the best part, with code POD20, you'll get 20 % off for life. So if you want to grow your channel faster, join thousands of YouTubers and head over to 1of10 .com.
Now back to the pod. But with all of these research, ways to research as well, you want to have your key rules for finding this inspiration. So the four main ones that we've got are four key rules.
Number one, stick to your target. So essentially, if it's education or if it's entertainment, you want to find inspiration in the relevant one. Number two, you want to look for the biggest outliers.
Under each step, you want to find the biggest outliers in, for example, the anime weapons, or you want to find the biggest outliers in the sister to interest topics. Then you want to look for highest view videos as well. So not just the biggest outliers, but the ones that are going to have really, really large amount of views because their outlier score is going to be lower.
but it still means that they have the virality potential. And then you want to look at them before you want to find at least some examples from the past six months, because with the matter on YouTube, a lot of people will jump on trends like as we're explaining that you should do here. And then a thumbnail concept might become so rinsed that it's just going to affect the performance of your video and data might be out of date, essentially.
Yes. And the next way we have to find basically inspiration again is based on the idea or title format. This is essentially when you're trying to research the same format as your idea to find what's working for other videos that are kind of like based on similar things.
So an easy example would be say your video is comparing like $1 versus $100 ,000 knives or whatever it is. You can search for other outliers that basically have the exact same format. So $1 versus $100 ,000.
Then you can also take it one layer deeper and really strip. what the core concept of your sort of idea format's about. So in this case, it's like comparison videos and you can just, then you can look for like broader comparison videos to basically get inspiration.
And just to really see what's working and what's the best way to sort of convey the idea of the video in thumbnails. And again, it's the same few rules to follow in this one as we had for the interest topics. So that's sticking to your target, which is essentially whether you're education or entertainment, look for the biggest outliers under each step.
Look for the highest view videos and then also try and find some outliers from within like the last six months or so just to get some more recency. in there as well. And finally, we have broad research.
So this is essentially anything that is not your format and not within your interest topic. This can be either on YouTube, outside of YouTube, outside of your niche, wherever. And before doing this step, it's really important that you kind of have a rough idea of what you want to show in your thumbnail, which is usually pretty clear based on your idea.
So it's usually going to be something revolving around the interest topic or the format. But in this example here, so I tried band energy drinks might be your idea. And then the elements you might want to show in the thumbnail would probably look something like, you know, if you want to show an energy drink of some sort in the thumbnail, or maybe you want to show multiple energy drinks.
And then maybe if you're an entertainment creator that's kind of larger and your face is often in the thumbnails, you know that you want to be in the thumbnail. And you can really start to list out a bunch of different things you want to be in the thumbnail. It doesn't have to be that you include all of these things, but it's just good to have an idea of some of the things you want to include before you kind of move on.
And then you're just looking for inspiration or sort of creative ways to show these elements or interest topics. So then there's about five ways that we found that you can do this. So the first one is just to look for thumbnails with similar element characteristics.
So for example, with the banned energy drink idea, you may look for images of people with like food or holding phones. So essentially things that are kind of like a similar size and how people would interact with them in the same way. So maybe you find some inspirations of people like, you know, holding the phone up to the camera and they're in the background, or maybe in the food niche, you see someone sat behind a table with like a bunch of different food items in front of them.
And essentially you're just looking for, or you're just thinking about different elements that you've seen in thumbnails in the past that kind of share similar characteristics with your items. And you can use one of 10 even to search like person yelling phone in front of camera. and you'll have someone here and what's cool is you can click on similar thumbnails and you'll just get different inspiration of ways of holding something in front of the camera which is the whole goal of here yeah exactly that and then actually the next step um is you can actually browse the one of ten home page just to get like lots of inspiration ninety percent of what you see probably won't be relevant to the idea um that you're doing but if you scroll for long enough eventually you'll see something so if you take a look on the the or you can change it there Maybe we'll just have to scroll down a little bit and see if we can find something that could potentially be a way.
And also if you can see second from the left with the poison. maybe there's a way that you could kind of take the composition of that thumbnail to show an energy drink, or maybe even on the far right one where the guy's in the background sort of holding it up to the camera at slight of an angle. Maybe that's something you could use once you kind of know the elements you want to show in the thumbnail.
And then the next step, you can basically do the exact same thing on the YouTube homepage, especially if this is for your channel, the chances are you watch similar -ish content or similar styles of content to what you make. So this is going to be a really good place to find some random inspiration too.
Next one, I love doing this for certain channels where you can essentially look outside of YouTube. So there's things like movie posters, album covers, anime shots, basically anything you've seen outside of YouTube that just looks really cool. And maybe it's like a different composition you've not seen.
It's really good sort of place just to get some random inspiration. And then finally, really, really important to create a thumbnail dump. So as you're going about a good day today, whether you're watching YouTube in the evening or when you're researching for other ideas, it's worth saving thumbnails that you like or thumbnails that you think you might be able to use in the future for different things and just keeping them all in one place.
And that way, when you go to make a new thumbnail, you have a massive database of cool thumbnail concepts that you can kind of go and look through. But yeah, that's kind of it for the broad research. And from each of these four steps, the end goal is just to have a bunch of outliers at the end that you can kind of then...
and start to think about potentially remixing. We're not remixing the thumbnail just yet, but just having all of the inspiration ready. And then we can move on to step number three.
Yeah, so step number three is why the inspiration worked. Essentially, what we're going to do is you're going to want to repeat this for every thumbnail inspiration you found above, no matter necessarily the method. So the first question you're going to ask yourself is, why was the thumbnail good?
And generally, from there, you're going to ask a second question. Did the thumbnail help improve the performance of the video? Or did the video do well?
In spite of bad thoughts, you can fairly easily figure that out just by kind of looking at it. It might be hard to tell at first, but you'll be able to run through this checklist down here and it'll give you a concrete answer. So yeah, first thing is what you're going to do is when you're looking at a video that's already performed, you're going to want to look at multiple data points across YouTube for similar thumbnail compositions, or should I forgot, compositions and elements to see if there is what we call like, you know, common denominators across multiple thumbnails or viral vectors across multiple thumbnails.
Essentially, it's something that has in common with other thumbnails that have also performed well within that niche, outside that niche, adjacent niches, etc. If the answer is yes, there are good data points that validate this thumbnail as a good thumbnail.
We also want to ask the next question is, does this thumbnail speak to one of the three pillars of human attention? The first being fear. Fear thumbnails cause your audience to feel a negative emotion, usually related to loss.
We have intrigue. Intrigue thumbnails speak to curiosity from your audience into an interest topic. So these are like high interest elements.
Are there high interest elements? Is there a curiosity gap? These are intrigue -based thumbnails.
And the third thumbnail based on human attention is going to desire. Desire thumbnails depict an element that represents the audience's ideal outcome, whether that be personal, family, something close to them, whatever it may be. It's depicting an ideal outcome that they want.
And then lastly, if it does, if it's like, yes, it does look like a good thumbnail, there's good points of data, there's file vectors, common denominator thumbnails. If yes, it does speak to one of the three pillars of human intention, then yes, the third question is why it's good is why does the thumbnail stop the scroll?
So if it is like yes to one of the, like you continue to have a checklist, you have to ask, you know, why does the thumbnail stop the scroll? Because if it doesn't stop the scroll, it's not going to be a good thumbnail. And generally, it's going to come down to pattern breaking.
It's like the universal rule as to why you are stopping the scroll. And it's usually one of these five things. The first being the color of the thumbnail.
Does it stand out in any way it should perform? Is it a little bit different? Is there anything weird about it?
Is there uncanny value to the color? That's going to be color. It's going to be composition is next up.
That's the second thing that breaks the scroll or stops the scroll rather is going to be how it's composed. So a great example of this is the Ryan Trahan thumbnail for his 50 state series when he is in Vermont. That like stops the scroll.
It's like a triangle. We don't really see triangles and thumbnails in terms of like the composition. That's like a great example of pattern breaking.
Next up is novelty, how novel the thumbnail is, novel the idea is. A great example of this is the saw fork thumbnail. It's first of all, it's a crazy novel idea, but it's also a novel thumbnail.
You see a fork made out of saw, but it's like, what is that? Another example is you see this a lot in the exotic packs niche. You'll see a blue tarantula, for example.
That's a great way to pattern break, not only with color, but it's also novel. It's brand new. The fourth way is text.
Text can break a pattern in terms of what is being said in the thumbnail. So for example, if you see a curse word blocked out, that goes against the brain of everything. It breaks the pattern.
But also really optimized text structures like podcast are also really good for pattern breaking because they get your attention. the most consistently and effectively. So something like Dyer as CEO crushes from the tech standpoint.
And lastly, another thing that breaks the scroll is going to be social hacking. So for example, I'm talking about athletes and I put the most famous athlete in there. If I know who that athlete is as a viewer, I'm going to stop and click.
It's going to be the same thing, reverse engineering it. You're going to want to figure out what is the biggest viral vector in terms of the social hacking that you can do if it makes sense for them. So this one for one of our clients.
uh where i guess parents are are afraid that their child will have autism uh this thumbnail you you came up with why why do you think it did so well i think it's honestly in the text of the first thing you see so obviously with the 50 50 split you read thumbnails from left to right we did the autism on the left and the first thing you read is autism The color contrast between it all as well.
So leaning back in the color, like we said, is a good way to stop the scroll. But then you've got the way it strikes fear. So it's a really, really good fear mongering concept, which is why it got in fear.
But we've heightened it with the aspect of that it's really supple. So in the thumbnail, on one side, there's a kid and he's looking away. And then on the other side, the kid's looking at the camera, but it's like still a very, very supple difference.
So that's going to strike enough fear into someone to really, really clip the video. Yeah, the one on the right looks like... Pretty focused, serious looks in front, whereas the other one looks like a bit lost.
So maybe that's like a big contrast. Yeah, so interesting. The 50 -50 split as well is purely composition.
Really easy and clear to understand. Yeah, I think it's really important with all three of these, but just to really understand who your audience is and what... is going to cause them to feel fit so for example if your audience doesn't have kids then this video is not going to cause any fear but if you have a kid and you obviously see this then it's it's going to create a lot more um and that's just that's what that's the really key thing about each of these is just understanding just exactly who your audience is and also what makes them click yeah for example this one the ai 2027 basically the audience is people who are afraid that ai will take over the world that will destroy the planet as we know So this basically shows, okay, this is what it's looking like.
And this is what's going to happen. The US government falls. That's like actually a big fear for that audience.
So they're definitely going to want to click and see what is potential scenarios. And just before we move on, if you're interested in downloading the exact blueprint we're using for thumbnails in this video, you can click in the link in the description and you'll get it sent into your inbox. So yeah, so that's in the fear.
I stick now in the intrigue. uh let's say a thumbnail you guys worked on this one why is it so good yes i mean obviously the idea is focused around um like the world's most expensive gym um they're using the thumbnail to sort of um almost like exaggerate the effect of just how premium and expensive this uh this gym is so you've got a bugatti out front and then there's a guy that's sort of like a chauffeur sort of um waiting outside the car.
And then everything in the gym is gold. You can kind of see it's like revealing open and it just creates this sense of like, this is a gym that no one's ever seen before. It's crazy.
Um, and, uh, sort of interest in like super wealthy high -end things is kind of like a bar or better as well. Um, I generally just creates a lot of interest with like a super broad audience, um, which obviously this, this video hit with, with 10 million views. And yeah, I don't know if it's...
Yeah, it shows the dream basically and you want to see what exactly is the most expensive gym in the world. Same for this one, right? This guy went from day one to day 100.
It's one of the best videos of the year, you were saying? Yeah, it shows basically how exactly in 100 days you've overcome. like a little chubby to pretty fit if you look at the one at the top of intrigue so you got uh how humans ruin dogs also you've got a yellow background so this one's like instantly pat breaks so start to scroll and then you've got the this is not a dog and a picture of a dog so like that's probably maximum level of intrigue for something to be like wait that that is a dog why is it not a dog so um then then they then they end up clicking or the other thumbnail you worked on with callaway yeah so with callaway the the sort of primary focus of his audience are people obviously make social media content and are wanting to learn how to grow on social media so with this video it's actually packaged a lot broader and it's kind of packaged more in a sort of intriguing way rather than like desire which we'll get to later and the idea is that social media is about to change forever and you obviously see on the curve you can see the current social media logos which we're kind of leveraging a little bit of like
more like recognizability, but you've got YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and you can see a point just before the curve's about to sort of spike up, which is like, this is where we are. And the sort of curiosity out that it's opening is, well, if we're only here, we're right down at the bottom, what's it going to look like right at the top?
And it's kind of setting up the intrigue around what Callaway's predictions are for the future. Yeah, but so for Desire, we have one here from Lena Hendricks, which is how to stop wasting your life. So this is Desire because it speaks to the viewer not wanting to waste their life.
The thumbnail here is a true panel thumbnail. I'm just the format and on the composition we have on the left side, kind of like his face looks a little bit like dishevel. He looks a little bit like, um, like sleep deprived.
And then we see the tech talk logo, which like recognizability or social acting to degrees. It's very, very recognizable. And on the right side, we have, you know, the transformation or the desired outcome, which is not to be wasted, like to stop wasting your life where it's like clear skin, like very awake.
I not like tick tock brain. Oh yeah. It shows you desired outcome from going from like wishing your life like doom sprawling, um, being like content addicted.
to not wasting your life achieving somewhat of your potential. It's a very good way to show that transformation very cleanly. Yeah, or the classic one.
This is the easiest one, I think, to understand this is how to study for exam, right? It normally takes nine hours, 18 hours, your whole night. He's showing you exactly how to study in two hours and then get an A+.
That's exactly what every student wants. So, of course, it's going to appeal for everybody in that niche. Same for this one.
how to stop wasting your life you see the before you see the after before everyone's like uh distracted uh from your phone from television phone um anything and after it's like someone who's really focused that's exactly what again every student wants uh it can be a doctors in his niche whatever it is uh he'll appeal to to his audience and show the the actual goal to that audience wants.
And yeah, this one's a classic one as well. Zero to a million dollars. Everyone wants that million dollar in that business niche.
So he's showing you right away that it's possible. But also what's interesting in this one is that you see a two hours and a half time length. And that actually adds on to the social proof that this is actually going to be a really in -depth.
uh version of the video so might add some social proof anyway that's outside of thumbnails yeah and i think the uh just a note on this one as well the zero dollar really helps to like relate to the the bulk of his audience as well if he'd have just had a million dollars on the screen then it doesn't really give that context but by showing that it goes from zero to one million um it's really resonating with the viewers of who are watching the video and it's kind of you know showing them that they can go from where they are right now all the way up to this to this sort of tree and for the left one where they are right now to what's possible what's the dream outcome basically in education content you generally sell the result to get people interested in the process um and then on entertainment content on the flip side uh you generally sell the process to get people interested in the the result and payoff um or yeah the outcome of the video and that's really what we can see here especially in these education thumbnails um is they're really focusing on selling the the um
They're selling the result that you get out of watching the video. So take the Ali Abdel one in the after, that's what you get out of watching the video. It makes you interested in the process of what he's explaining in the video.
Then if we flip over to like an entertainment content, so maybe we go over to like the Will Tennyson one, he's selling the process, which is him going to this gym. And in order to build up to the payoff, which is obviously like seeing inside the gym and kind of getting to reveal everything can actually. Well, once you're at that stage, you've got to find the actual concept that makes sense for your niche, right?
So we've basically reverse engineered every single way that the one can take an inspiration and turn it into a banger thumbnail. So I'll show you guys. So once is level one and level two.
We separate it in two ways. So one is level one. Basically, you have the same interest topic.
And then level two, it's a different interest topic. So basically, you get inspired from a different niche. So level one, let's say you get inspired in the same niche, you have the way of taking the same composition and then the same elements.
So it's pretty much the same thing when you think about it, but you just change really the person in it or an object that's at the same location. So for example here, for Japanese capsule hotels, that did really well, 59 million views seven years ago. He took the same angle, just changed it slightly a bit and then changed the person for him.
And that also did really well for him at 7 million views. Then number two is same composition, different elements. So how to do this?
So for example, you're in the same niche with your interest topic. So here it's a bad Amazon poise. So we go from this one.
where the toys is biting the skin off of the youtuber then it's basically the same composition but just changing the toy same here like we talked earlier you can also get inspired by external inspirations which is in this case anime so we went from that cool scene from from Naruto and brought it for his niche. That's entertainment, but still in the anime niche.
So we're still in the same interest topic. Then we looked at a different niche. So this is more advanced, I'd say, but it's the one I feel can be one of the most useful for you guys.
So basically, you're getting inspired with the same composition, but changing the elements for your niche. So for example, we've done it, we can see it three times here. So here the person's on the right, the object's on the left, and it has some kind of like disappointed reaction with all the objects there.
So same composition, different objects. So here more for the shopping niche, and this one is more for the sports car niche. Same here, same composition.
So you have the zero players online above and below is basically for a different game. This one's specifically for Call of Duty, whereas this one is just general games. And even this one, you can see the angle of an archer going from bottom left going to top right.
Same thing, he took the same composition, but then just totally changed it for the Minecraft world. So as you can see, that's a lot how we think when we're looking at thumbnails. Do you guys have anything to add on this one?
It's a pretty important one. Okay, so before we go into the next thing, just to quickly explain basically some of the language we're going to be using. So elements, when we refer to elements, we mean the things inside of the thumbnail.
So that might be, for example, someone holding a phone or an object, or it might be the person themself, or even like the background. And then when we refer to the composition, we essentially mean the arrangement of those elements. So that could be the format, whether it's 50 -50 split screen.
It might be that the person stood at the back holding something out in front of them. or a whole range different things but that's essentially what we mean by those terms so elements is what's in the thumbnail and composition is the arrangement of those elements the third way is uh same element different composition this time so for example here for mike shake we knew that we wanted to do a sword video so we had the idea but didn't know exactly how to to to show it he it could have been like a pov of him it could have been a third person version of it so we really searched everywhere And then we saw this one with, what was it, 11 million views three years ago, where he's splicing a skeleton.
And we thought it was a really, really cool shot. And it was data back. So we're like, okay, let's try that out.
So we have a mannequin, a sword, and a person. So this is exactly what we did. So we took a person, a sword, and a mannequin, but just in a different way where we thought would be more impactful or more intriguing for a person.
scrolling on YouTube. So just to be clear, so it's taking the same elements and just a completely different composition of it. Yeah, so for level two, for doing same elements in different composition, what you're going to want to do is also focus on different interest topics.
So for this case in Will Tennyson, we took the composition from the technique, which was very popular, which is holding a small object in front of the camera or in the foreground, while the actual person presenting it, who is the big band themselves in most cases, is in the background. The general reason for this is because it does still attract the core audience.
It also makes the product to focus. So people who are not in your core audience and they're wide that know about the product would be interested in the product in this case. leading them to that.
In addition to that, we also added other elements from Ryan Trahan and specifically the Ben Amazon products. With the review on the right side, it fills a little dead space there. So we're combining the composition from the tech niche and the elements from broad entertainment and kids entertainment with Ryan Trahan and the Ben Amazon products.
We get a brand new thumbnail with different elements, different composition for the niche that he's in, and different intro topics. And the last one is... all the opposite so different composition and different elements so what do we mean by that so let's say for the same interest topic so here we're in the anime niche still so going back to the same inspiration also inspired me for this uh channel of uh talking about one piece uh i thought again it would um it would keep the intensity the rage of it of uh of him here getting killed uh so i took so that angle of it but kind of changed the the the perspective and i changed the the person on on on the image so from rockley to to luffy which led to to this uh pretty banger thumbnail his third most viewed video yeah so another great example of different compositions but and different elements but still kind of conveying of the the same like uh interest topic rather is going to be this one here where it is still like the
Same interest topic where it's like the hidden room, but the compositions and the elements are different. So the first one, the composition is like under a pool and like we see like the room in there and the elements are like, you know, he's in a red shirt, it's like in the backyard. Whereas the second one, it's like, you know, it's going to be like behind the TV, the elements, she's got the yellow art ad to contrast and guess the inside of the room, the TV.
We see the POV of the guy of the remote. So it's different composition, different elements, but same interest topic. So then you can get different elements and different composition and a different interest topic.
So one thing I noticed on YouTube is, I mean, there's billions of them. So the chances are the composition you're looking for has been done somewhere else. And this is more so not about finding that original composition, but more so about how you can adapt to the outliers that you found.
So in this example, for one of my clients, tile prompts, once we had the idea, we then came across this thumbnail format here, which was essentially like a three -way sort of split screen showing the different strategies on each of the devices. And we wanted to replicate that sort of thumbnail style, but we wanted to do it in the AI generation niche.
So we completely changed the interest topic. Um, and then we didn't want to show it three vertically because it was kind of difficult to, um, to fit like the character in and, and show the shots we wanted to shot. So then we thought let's do a four way split.
So then we're changing the composition. Uh, and obviously the elements are completely different, um, as well. Um, but yeah, that's actually how this works.
Um, and yeah. But then while you're doing this, you got to keep in mind the best practices that we've laid out all out here so we can go through quickly. Uh, because in the end we were trying to understand, okay.
what what is the goal of the thumbnail in the end it's this it's the thumbnail let's say you have like 10 concepts you want the one that has the that will get the most clicks and also the one that will get the highest avd but in order to do that so you got to keep in mind that there's two big themes in the youtuber world right educational and entertainment so in education so You want to sell the result to get people interested in the process.
And in entertainment, you sell the process to get people interested in the result payoff, which Holly mentioned before. And then the best practices. So in general, you want like three elements max.
But also to be clear, like every single point here does not need to be met. It's more something to keep in mind and maybe it helps create a better thumbnail for you. So let's go through it.
So three elements on the thumbnail. Text that is very easy to read. bold colors so that it pops on the homepage.
And before getting into that, let me tell you about how the 1 of 10 strategy team can help you grow your channel much faster and make more money. Our team has directly worked with over 100 YouTubers to grow their channels by optimizing their content, focusing on the right strategy. So for example, here's a video idea title and thumbnail that we crafted for Mike Shake that ended up getting 22 million views and being his most popular video of all time.
Another example is the content strategy we built for Callaway, helping him go from zero to 70 ,000 subscribers and grow a six figure business on top of that. And those are only just two of many creators the team has worked with in the past six years. So if you're ready to take your channel to the next level in the next 90 days with daily support, video reviews, winning ideas, and thumbnails, and even two calls per month to answer all your questions, head over to oneoftone .com slash Shaji to book a call.
Oh yeah, the location of the timestamp. So on every region, the right -hand corner is a timestamp. On different devices, it's different sizes.
Any light text and things that you really want to highlight, avoid putting them in the bottom right -hand corner of the thumbnail. Indeed. Next, you want it bright or have high contrast.
So I got to ask you guys, why do you think high contrast makes you want to click more? It helps with stroke. Scroll stopping.
So when you're browsing your homepage and obviously if something's got high contrast, then it immediately catches your eye. And then it also means each of the elements are really easy to recognize behind one another and everything doesn't just blend together and look really busy. Big elements.
The big elements are great because they stay intact, right? So the larger the element, the easier it is to convey like super quickly what that element is and what you're talking about, right? So for example, you're talking about like...
you know money you want to use the number as big as possible so you can easily recognize it so there's no confusion and grabs your attention as quick as possible meets the mood of the video yeah so it meets the mood of the video uh generally what happens there is if you have a certain mood of a video let's say it's a challenge video you want that to be reflected in the mood so recently i just did a thumbnail for a gaming client where it's a challenge base and the mood is like know you up against like a crazy crazy difficult challenge and we convey that in the thumbnail with what's actually being shown so you want to like capture the mood for the thumbnail another great example is like commentary videos they crush with capturing the mood with having a motion specifically on the face that represent what they're talking about the video and the vibe you're trying to build yeah and this also applies to education as well so if you're going to be giving a super in -depth detailed um sort of like raw breakdown of a really complex topic
then you only have your thumbnail be some brain rot, super bright colored, all over the place style thumbnail. And you ideally want to reflect the actual content of the video in the thumbnail so that you get the right people to click. Because the worst case scenario is that you get the wrong people.
You either get no one to click or you get the wrong people to click who then the video is not what they're expecting and leave. So it's all about getting the right people to click the video. Yeah, another one.
So you want to make sure it passes the glance or sometimes people do the script test. So the big thing here is that you're making sure that your thumbnail is going to be easy and visible by the time it's on YouTube, because obviously YouTube is going to compress the size. You're going to be looking at your thumbnail, maybe on Photoshop or if on Canva, depending on what you use, you're going to be looking at it on a full screen.
Whereas when it's on YouTube, it's going to be compressed. It's going to be condensed. It's going to be a smaller size, especially when people are scrolling on YouTube as well.
You want to make sure that at a glance, people can see where your thumbnail is in it. attracts their attention. Yeah.
Next up is pattern breaks. So generally on YouTube, there's like consistent rules that are followed and things that you want to actually do on YouTube. Pattern breaks are essentially things that go out of that norm or they kind of break that standard deviation where they are eye -catching because they are different, right?
So generally all of these things here are things to consider. They also help pattern breaking. So having like high contrast can be pattern breaking and depending on your niches, having like different elements.
Yeah, so a great example of a pattern breaking towards a composition is from a man -made. It is, I built an office pot under my stairs. So generally like thumbnail information is conveyed either vertically or horizontally.
But what this is, is that he's using the framing of like his actual like wall and the staircase of the house. And then we see like a triangle, cutout, which is like a crazy pattern break because you don't see those types of shapes in YouTube thumbnails basically ever.
So the information is conveyed through a triangle rather than vertically or horizontally in a square rectangle. So that's a massive out of date. Yeah, fifth grade reading level text.
That's basically straightforward. I mean, yeah, the text on the thumbnail, basically, you got to be able to read it at a first glance and understand in 0 .1 second. uh while using long words or anything like that you want to make sure same same thing as you would do with in the title you want to simplify everything as much as possible so anyone can look at it and just read it um really easily cool i mean next is contrasting colors i think we kind of touched on this earlier as well but again it just helps to create more scroll stopping and it also helps to essentially make each of the elements pop and sort of easier to read or to see It makes your question and opens up the curiosity gap.
This is generally going to be great for entertainment videos where what you're doing is you are showing the process to get interested in the payoff. So any thumbnail that falls in this kind of category, follows this, is going to make you question what's going on. In this case, it does it in two different ways.
So first, it challenges your normal beliefs where if you see a blue tarantula. That's weird. That's different.
I'm confused. Why is it blue? And then the text in the thumbnail is rock number 46, which means like, generally speaking, there's 45 rocks before this.
So if he unlocked the blue tarantula at rock 46 or uncovered one, what are any other 45 rocks he's uncovered? So there's two kind of curiosity gaps there that are open to buy this thumbnail that you want to close. And the next one is to avoid giving the payoff.
This generally applies more to entertainment than education, but it can apply to both. So we could take like a Mr. Beast video as an example and if the thumbnail was just a picture of the person at the start of the challenge winning and then he was celebrating winning the money and it completely gave away the payoff then it creates less incentive for people to actually watch the content.
I think the same concept could also apply to education where say you were saying you know like here's five hacks to do XYZ and in the thumbnail you just give away all the five hacks and then it's like well why would I watch the video you've already given me the payoff. So it's just worth keeping that in mind to avoid ruining the reason why people would watch the video, essentially.
Yeah. And then next one, we got viral vectors. So as every video, same title, same ideas, you want to try and implement a viral vector just because it's something that a lot of people are going to relate to.
It's going to make your broad target. addressable market larger as well so for example with the bacl use a lamborghini and a lot of his thumbnails because it's something that sparks people's attention and universally people resonate with the lamborghini another one could be if you're in like the food or cooking niche you might put corn ramsey on the thumbnail because a lot of people are interested in that topic will know who gordon ramsey is and then instantly it's gonna scroll stop and then they're like oh okay Cool, Ramsey's in this.
Now I'm more interested. Next up is showing action. Generally, it's going to be good for entertainment.
It can also be good for education. In entertainment, usually you're going to be showing some type of physical action, doing a thing. Maybe it's piloting a thing or driving a thing.
There's a guy that, like, reviews military planes, which is, like, crazy. And he, like, flies, like, the B -2 stealth bomber and stuff. That's a great action.
So it'll be, like, him pressing, like, to drop a meat butt. That's an action. But on the education standpoint, it can also be showing an action like making money or actively making money.
You see this in trading space. You see this in the e -commerce space where the action is being shown is the money collected or the oppositions being made in terms of like reading charts, et cetera. So it's a different type of action when necessarily think it's a physical action, but it's a mental action being executed.
Yeah. So next up, we got high quality image assets. So generally speaking, again, good for both.
This is actually predominantly better for education. And the reason why is that when you are in a space that is predominantly focused on dual authority in the education you give, there's usually a barrier of entry to your viewers' attention.
And if you have high quality assets, it lowers that barrier to entry. quite a lot because they can see that, oh, these assets are really high quality. That means the video is high quality by association, right?
It just lowers kind of their, their like, like disbelief or reason not to click. So they'll tell, obviously it's like high quality assets, therefore it's high quality execution. We'll click.
This is also true in entertainment, the higher quality your assets are in entertainment, the easier it is. to click on a thumbnail because the viewer can be like, oh, he spent all his time on this, all his money on this, therefore it should be good. In addition to that, also high -quality image assets allow viewers just to look better on TV because if you're on TV and you're far away, you've got those big high -quality assets, those big thumbnails, you want them to be pixelated because it will degrade the quality and therefore increase the barrier of entry for viewers to click.
Yeah, so next up is novelty. Novelty is generally like... broken into two categories, how unique something is and how new something is.
As humans, from like a psychological standpoint, we create new things that are one -off. I mean, that's why people like to go to fine dining and Michelin star restaurants. They're all focused on novelty and the novelty of these screens or how new or unique the experience is.
On thumbnails, this is a great way to also pattern break. It's also good to follow through on education and entertainment. It's a novel thumbnail.
So we have this video right here, Gen Z's... addiction to locking in. First of all, eyes are a massive viral vector or something that JD talked about earlier.
But it's also novel in the sense that they're a little bit out there. They catch your attention because it's black and white. And then you have these two eyes that are like kind of colorful.
They're like a little bit weird. So it's a novel image of eyes, right? We see this also like work really well in the anime space.
You see like the special eyes are super novel and like the pinnacles of their series because of their novelty and how unique they are. They really stand out. And this is also applied.
to hear in this thumbnail, which is Gen Z's addiction to logging in. It's just a new and unique experience that hasn't been done before. So the next one is authority.
In both educational and entertainment, it's important to have authority. You may think that authority is only relevant for educational because you want to get people to click. And a lot of times it's like how to make money and you want to show in a thumbnail that you made a lot of money.
But it actually applies to entertainment as well. For example, if we went to Will Tennyson's thumbnail, there's a video of him. There's a lot of videos of his that he tries different gyms.
Whereas if someone went and did that video and they didn't have his physique, he would get more views because he's already got a jacked physique. Someone's more inclined to watch his because they can see he goes to the gym a lot. So his opinion matters more.
And finally, we got any negative data. So, yeah, any negative data, it's basically to see if something has been overused, right? So, for example, the class, this one, the zero to one million dollar, that's been a year ago or almost two years ago.
It was, let's say, novel. It was revolutionary. But then it's been rinsed in every single niche in the education world or even the business side.
And so once it's a bit overused, you look at the past six months and you see if there's been outliers or thumbnails with that many or videos with high views. If you don't see that, then maybe that's not the right thumbnail to be used. So after every step that we see here, you end up with a thumbnail that is approved.
So normally we try to have at least three concepts for each. published video so then that you can then test and see if it actually works and just a quick reminder as well that you need to keep testing so and it's never too late for example we can see here an example of a video that was where the thumbnail was changed half a year after publication date and it got it was stuck at 100k views and got 1 .7 million views actually 2 million And now 2 million more views.
So just because of one thumbnail change, which is crazy. So definitely something to recommend that we can see like there's thousands of examples. Here is another one from Ali.
Yes, it's another one. Just jumped on a call with one of my friends. And the video done really well for his channel.
This was like, I think it was his third video and it was on my 70 ,000 views. You see the original thumbnail here on the left. We didn't make any other title changes.
All we did was change the thumbnail from this to this. It took a couple of hours and then the video went from 70 ,000 views up to now I'd say over 400 ,000 views. So it just really goes to show the power at all levels of just retesting and changing thumbnails and basically just keep testing until you find something that can make it work.
Yeah, but it's also dependent on how much time you have. Like the main... priority is to think about the next video, but if you have some leeway to hire a thumbnail designer or to think about it for an hour for your back catalog, it's always worth it to put a little time to change those thumbnails in the past.
And in general, you try to find the ones... The best ROI on your time to split test is really on the most popular videos because they are ideas that have been proven, so they're more easily... um there's there's more chance for them to to go up and the uh the other one is the the one with the highest retention so all relative to your other videos in inside your channel with the ones that has low clicks so those are the two that we recommend and um yeah So our third example is Will Tennison.
Yeah, so this is Will. So what we did is we thought we had a banger thumbnail. And sometimes even if the data is good and passes all the tests, it might just not resonate with the audience, which could be somewhat of an education issue on our part.
You know, just kind of... I'm betting on those type of things. But what we can do is we can, let's say we do post a flop early on, we can change it to something that's worked.
So at the time, Sambuca was crushing with a specific style. He was investigating, you know, dying franchises. And it was kind of this angle here where he has like this specific kind of rendering of like a building, like kind of disheveled.
So we switched to Will outside the building with like a disheveled building and like one left rather than like the oldest gym in the sense that like he was at the oldest gym. We also changed the the title that also is a kind of a secondary so I pop into the video So it still makes sense with the thumbnail and it did say that a little bit I mean it's not a you know one out of ten would have went for a 10 out of 10 to a 5 out of 10 at the end of the which was fairly good or another last one close to heart is the one of 10 podcasts so as you can see for the first month had what like a thousand views but we tested about like 20 thumbnails And luckily, one word.
This is like a proven format, a proven composition that worked well in all kinds of niches. And we figured it would make sense for this video interview with Will Tennyson. And immediately, it started blowing up.
And then just continue. Then to this day, it's still getting thousands of views per week. That kind of shows or that clearly shows that you shouldn't be testing at all time and try to see a video that you're really passionate about, that you're really confident it was a good video.
It's definitely worth at least a thumbnail change. This is a masterclass to find the banger thumbnail for your next video to get your next one of 10. You can click the link in the description right now to get access to all of our assets we use to make this and many more that gives you guaranteed inspiration for your next one of 10.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The opening claim is blunt: one thumbnail change took a video past 90 million views. The rest of the episode is the 1of10 team opening up the whiteboard they use with clients and walking through every step, from where to find inspiration to the checklist that decides whether a concept ships.
Named ideas worth stealing.
00:58list
The four inspiration sources
- Blank inspiration (sketch from nothing)
- Interest topic research (topic, sister, cousin)
- Idea and title format research
- Broad research outside your niche and YouTube
Four places to collect thumbnail inspiration before designing anything, ending with a pile of outliers to remix.
Steal forany creative brief where you need proven references before starting
05:00list
Four rules for picking inspiration
- Stick to your target (education or entertainment)
- Look for the biggest outliers
- Look for the highest-view videos
- Find some examples from the past six months
Filters that keep research focused on concepts that are proven, broad and still fresh.
Steal forad creative research or swipe-file curation
02:30model
Interest topic family tree
- Interest topic (sword)
- Parent topic (weapons)
- Sister topics (axe, knife, gun)
- Cousin topics (anime, game and named swords)
Climb to the parent category to find adjacent subjects whose winning thumbnails transfer cleanly to yours.
Steal forfinding adjacent-niche ideas for any content or ad
11:45list
Three pillars of human attention
- Fear (a negative emotion, usually loss)
- Intrigue (curiosity about a high-interest topic)
- Desire (the viewer's ideal outcome)
Every working thumbnail speaks to at least one of these emotional drivers.
Steal forheadlines, hooks and ad angles
12:40list
Five ways to stop the scroll
- Color
- Composition
- Novelty
- Text
- Social hacking (recognizable people or objects)
The pattern breaks that explain why a thumbnail grabs attention in a crowded feed.
Steal forany visual in a feed, including ads and social posts
21:10concept
Sell the result vs sell the process
Education thumbnails show the result so viewers want the process; entertainment thumbnails show the process so viewers want the payoff.
Steal fordeciding what any promo should reveal and what it should hold back
21:44model
Elements vs composition remix matrix
- Same composition, same elements
- Same composition, different elements
- Same elements, different composition
- Different composition, different elements
- Level 1: same interest topic
- Level 2: different interest topic
Turn any outlier into an original concept by deciding what to keep and what to swap, either inside your niche or borrowed from another.
Steal foradapting any proven creative to a new product or audience
30:10list
Thumbnail best practices checklist
- Three elements max
- Easy-to-read text
- Bold colors
- Nothing important in the bottom right timestamp area
- Bright or high contrast
- Big elements
- Matches the mood of the video
- Passes the glance test
- Pattern break
- Fifth-grade reading level text
- Opens a curiosity gap
- Avoids giving away the payoff
- Viral vectors
- Shows action
- High-quality image assets
- Novelty
- Authority
- No negative data
A final pass on every concept; not every box must be ticked, but each one raises the odds of a click from the right viewer.
Steal fora QA checklist before publishing any thumbnail or ad image
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
45:10link
“You can click the link in the description right now to get access to all of our assets we use to make this.”
A soft close that ties back to the free blueprint offered mid-video; the heavier pitches were the two in-video ads for the tool and the strategy service.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
Visual structure at a glance.
