SATURDAY BRAINRAMBLE: THUMBNAILS AND SUCH

YouTube is slowly beating the graphic designer out of me. Or, at least, beating him into a new shape. 

Whatever my specific brand of being creative is, I’ve always felt it doesn’t really work for YouTube. I have always struggled with thumbnails, with SEO, with just conveying the ideas in our vids. I feel utterly out of my depth with it. It’s maybe the one part of doing YouTube that I don’t enjoy. I mean, I enjoy making the thumbnails, but not when I have to really think about what might be most clickable. I haven’t a clue what people will click on! I clearly don’t think like most people!

YouTube has this new feature called Test and Compare, where you upload three different thumbnails, it distributes them across YouTube, and then chooses the one that gets the most clicks. Typically, this is not going to be the one that I would prefer.

I like our most recent style – the big yellow writing with the Indiana Jones-y titles – but… Milton Keynes and a couple of others aside, they don’t seem to be very good at selling our videos.

They look lovely on our channel page, all together, but… when you look across YouTube, there’s clearly a reason why all the thumbnails look sort similar, and half of them follow the Mr Beast template: because it works. I hate that it works. But it works. Pointing works. Arrows work. Pulling a stupid face works.

So, I’m now going kind of minimalist without entirely losing what we had before, and feeding those through into test and compare. My face big on the thumbnail. Simple images, minimal text (if any), and we’ll see how that does.

I do struggle with conveying that we’re funny as well as factual. There’s no real category on YouTube that we fit into. We’re not out-and-out comedy. The closest is “Travel and events”. There’s no “documentary” or “funny documentary” category. It’s like everything on YouTube is kind of forcing creators into a box; do more of what is already proven to work.

It’s a constant challenge. Our videos tend to be quite long, so they don’t work as an impulse watch. They’re a commitment. Once you know what we are, you’re with us all the way, it seems.

Our views are up, our subs are up, but things have slowed (which they always were going to, of course). The War vid has done well by our standards, but didn’t do as well as Canary Wharf, and that’s a shame, because we both feel it’s the best thing we’ve ever done. It has a bit of everything. It’s funny, weird, factual, passionate, real. But yes, it’s also very long. So… I ‘unno! I like doing substantial vids. I find them more satisfying. 

But…

We also have had a big gap between War and this weekend’s Ghost Hunt – due to mother-related shenanigans – and while that gives people time to catch up, and while we have been putting up shorts, ideally we wouldn’t leave it that long again. Not least because we want to keep Patrons stuffed with our content.

Our aim is to try and do some shorter, easier-to-film, more digestible videos in between the big tentpole ones. A bit like the Holme Fen Posts one, but maybe about 15 minutes, if we can reign in our impulses (and share the outtakes or extended version with all of you). So, that’s the plan going forwards.

Of course, anything we say these days is dependent on how badly life has battered us around the head on any given week, and the fact we need to finish Digi Level 2 asap. We need to do that quick, as we’re putting my mother’s house on the market next week – we’ve been told she needs to sell it to pay for her care (it’s been a whole thing) – and we are aiming to film a couple of segments there. 

Anyway. Bit of a Saturday morning ramble. Basically, I’m procrastinating getting out of bed.

Oh! Last thing: It’s my birthday in a couple of weeks. Last year we did a birthday stream. It was a lot of fun, so I’d like to do one again, but… I don’t want to promise anything at this stage, due to stuff. If it happens though, it’ll be the weekend of the 3rd/4th. Just sayin’.

Right. Better get up. I’m hungry.

Have a good weekend, you lot.

Paul