Once in a while, I go back to my old videos and watch what I made. I’ll get inspired by old work and read some comments. Just before Christmas, I was doing the same and I looked at my “I am Surgeon” video. I clicked on the analytics and saw that the thumbnail had a 3.6% CTR. Not bad, not terrible.But when I looked at the thumbnail, my brain went like, why did I put “hired” in the thumb? Like, in the video he doesn’t get hired, more like “still fired.” At the time I made that video, the A/B/C thumbnail testing wasn’t available yet, so I thought, why the heck not. Let’s try something. I made 3 thumbnails: one with “You’re hired,” one with “Hired,” and one with “Fired.” I also wanted to test if shortening the text might be the thing that did it. I ran the test without changing the title: Now keep in mind that YouTube tests “watch time,” not “CTR,” with this test. I check whether the total watch time is higher, so impressions times watch duration. And to my sort of surprise, thumbnail C won with “Fired.” Now my theory is that the thumbs up from Dr. House plus the word “Fired” creates more friction, and people wait for that moment to come, which sort of does come. You can actually see the CTR of the video increase too, so people find it more eye-catching in some way. Probably because it’s something “negative” (his face) next to something “positive” (thumbs up) next to something “negative.” It creates a sort of story arc, which creates interest. As you can see, a YouTube veteran like me can still learn and improve. Nice little Christmas present, this. Update, this is what happen to the views after changing the thumbnail. If you haven’t seen the video yet, you can click below.
