What to Watch:

Thumbnail Breakdown

Don’t Do This!

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Creator’s we love

This channel breaks a few rules in the right way. If you look at the thumbnails, you might think to yourself - “they seem cluttered” and you’d be right. There seem to be a lot of elements kicking around. What I want to point out though, is how clear the main objects are. He’s using a principle I like to call “Simplicity in Chaos”. The main objects of the photos are well defined, even if there is ‘clutter’ around them. But let’s think about it like this: What feeling do you get when you look at these thumbnails? Do you feel like the videos are going to be hyper edited? Do they look like there’s going to be a thousand facts a second? Or do they look like a cozy living room/ study where someone’s going to teach you something deep? There is thought into this, the dark brown wood of the desk, the handwriting on the notebook, the headphones on in the self-photo. Everything is built to let the viewer know what they’re about to click on. What would it look like if you were to try to capture a feeling in your packaging?

Breaking YouTube News

VidIQ talks about some new YouTube Updates
Key takeaways:
1.) Comments from your viewers can now be search terms if the comment is popular enough.
2.) The user/viewer can now hide YouTube shorts from their feed (temporarily)
3.) Custom AI thumbnails for Playists
4.) Badges for subscribers/dedicated fans of a channel (mobile only)
5.) Collaborative playlists with ranking
6.) Sleep Timer
How you can prepare:

1.) Since comments are going to become search friendly, user engagement is as important as ever, if you already communicate with your viewers then you’re on the right track.
2.) Shorts have been the shortcut to some massive success for a few creators over the last months/years - but now it seems like the trend is towards long from, so think twice before going all in on short form.
3.) Custom AI thumbnails for Playlists isn’t that huge, but it does mean that YouTube is toying with AI generation for thumbnails inside of YouTube itself.
4.) Badges for your users can be another awesome way to interact, and it might give your ‘heart’ button a little more weight, as achievements stack up. It allows for a type of gamification of YouTube, that the creator can take advantage of if they plan properly.
5.) Collaborative playlists is actually huge. The reason for this, is that let’s say someone made a playlist of “Best videos in XNiche” What this means is that everyone will be able to rate these as ‘best'/’worst’ meaning it won’t be up to how many views a certain video has, it will be more of a community effort to actually put forth the best content. Additionally this will let creators make playlists with their viewers/subscribers so if you’ve thought about making a playlist full of resources, it can be a good chance to connect with your audience, and with other creators alike.
6.) Sleep timer really only affects those channels with 3+ hour long videos, just be wary that you may be missing out on some watch time if a lot of users choose to implement this.

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