When you're looking for inspiration, the reflex is to check out the biggest channels. The problem: a huge channel gets views with almost any thumbnail, thanks to its audience. There's no way to tell whether the thumbnail made the difference.
What's an outlier?
An outlier is a video that got way more views than usual for its channel. A channel that usually gets around 20,000 views per video and puts one out that hits 200,000 has found something: a topic, an angle, a thumbnail.
You measure it with a simple ratio: the video's views divided by the channel's usual views. The median of its recent videos is a good benchmark, because a single viral video won't skew it.
Careful: the video worked, not necessarily the thumbnail
An outlier tells you the video worked. That could be down to the topic, the news, a share. The thumbnail is only one of the factors. That's why you need to look at several and find what keeps coming back, rather than drawing conclusions from a single video.
The 4-step method
- Pick your niche and a recent time period, to stay in line with what works right now.
- Gather outliers: twenty or so at the very least, from different channels.
- Look for common threads: framing, emotion, number of elements, colors, text, type of background.
- Turn them into rules for your own thumbnails, instead of copying a specific image.
What to look at
| Questions to ask yourself | |
|---|---|
| Composition | A single subject in the center? Several elements? Lots of empty space? |
| Face | Is there one? What emotion? Where does it sit in the image? |
| Colors | Which color dominates? What stands out from the background? |
| Text | How many words? Where? Which font? |
| Story | What question does the thumbnail raise? |
Copy? No. Get inspired? Yes.
Reusing a thumbnail as is is risky (it's someone else's work) and it doesn't work well: the audience may have already seen it. Keep the mechanics (the type of framing, the contrast, the emotion) and change everything else.
Keep what you find
An idea you don't write down is an idea you lose. Sort your references by theme: one tag per niche, per style, per composition idea. When it's time to create, you open the right folder instead of starting from scratch.