The # 1 How-to for Eye-Catching Thumbnails

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You hear all of the tips and tricks for thumbnails: polished, clear jpg images, not video grabs; close ups of the eyes, show teeth; make people connect with your face! That’s all true. The #1 thing I found with thumbnails is this: find the essence of the story, and what your headline will be, and make THAT what your subject’s face is reacting to. That’s it. Simple to teach. Hard in execution. Because you have to know, and produce these things in mind BEFORE you film the video. With the below thumbnails from my work at VidCon, I found that people were responding to the wacky facial expressions mixed with a bold graphic, and a catchy title. The below example shows Jazza making a funky face, JadenAnimations smiles, because they played a cultural trivia game where an Australian taught slang terms to an American. When she lost, she had to eat Vegemite, which most Americans do not have the acquired taste for. The question mark stands in for the trivia aspect, and makes you wonder if she wins or not.

You can also play with headlines’ as questions that tie directly with the thumbnail. For the Merrell Twins video (below) we have close ups of their shocked faces, and the title was “Is the Merrell Twins Tim Tam Slam and Win or a Fail?” Their posing to do the Tim Tam Slam. One face looks like a “win” and one face looks like a “fail.” So people really connected the image with the question in the title, and this video had a high click-through rate because of that intriguing factor. Also, the bright yellow background stands out when on the right side of the YouTube interface. This video blasted virally in one weekend and amassed over 250,000 views.

The headline for this video was about the snakes and spiders of Australia. Matt and Rebecca Zamolo talked about their experiences with these creatures, while at VidCon Australia. Again, the fun facial expression with the bold graphic that directly connects with your feeling of “Whoa!” led to another viral video that jumped to over 320,000 views.