General thumbnail advice is useful. But your best source is your own channel: your videos have already been shown to your audience, and the results are right there. You just have to read them.
Compare like with like
A video published two years ago has had time to pile up views, last week's hasn't. Compare recent videos with each other, and look at their views relative to what your channel usually gets.
The 4-step method
- Take your latest videos, twenty or thirty of them, leaving out Shorts.
- Rank them by their views relative to your median.
- Put side by side the thumbnails from the top and the bottom of the ranking.
- Note what changes: face or no face, brightness, colors, amount of text, framing.
Example findings
| What you might notice | |
|---|---|
| Face | Videos where your face is big do better than the ones where it's small |
| Brightness | The dark thumbnails are all at the bottom of the ranking |
| Text | Thumbnails without text do no worse than the others |
| Colors | The same color keeps showing up in the best ones |
These are examples, not rules: every channel has its own. That's exactly why the audit is useful.
The trap: mistaking the thumbnail for the topic
A video can blow up thanks to its topic, with an average thumbnail. If your best videos all have a strong topic, don't jump to conclusions about the thumbnail. Look instead for what keeps coming back across different topics.
What next?
Turn what you found into 2 or 3 simple rules for your next thumbnails, then check in a few weeks whether they hold up. You can also put a rule to the test with YouTube's A/B test.