Choose Thumbnails with Confidence

ecently I’ve been feeling a bit of a time crunch to get everything in order before my annual break at the end of the year. Making me rethink my workflow once again and looking for ways to free up some time.

So instead of editing the next video in line I took a day to get every conversation recorded to the same point of being assembled and ready to cut. It was a painfully dull Monday but it’s gonna make life for future me that much easier.

💛 Valentin

New in Orbit:
📺 She left the Verge, now what …? 
🎧 She left the Verge, now what …? 
📝 2 Bold Predictions for 2025

Getting Brutal Feedback on Thumbs to Grow

Choosing the perfect thumbnail can feel like gambling. Even with good feedback from people you trust. Conflicting opinions and 50/50 splits on polls have often left me wondering: Does this even stand out?

But I might’ve just discovered a secret weapon to solve this problem. After hearing about ChatGPT Roasts and realizing it can accurately analyze thumbnails I had already used to give me feedback on different thumbnail versions but the next step was to get roasted against videos people actually watch.
This was desperately needed after facing two consecutive 10 out of 10s.

So here is how it goes

• Screenshot the YouTube homepage and edit in your thumbnail.

• Promt: In this lineup of thumbnails which one stands out?

• Refine your thumbnail based on its feedback.

  

Does it pick the ones with the most views? No.
But it has a pretty good understanding of what draws human attention and it’s first response already gave me better insights to why my past thumbnails got lost in the endless sea of content than any human feedback I’ve gotten so far.

Mainly making it painfully clear that most of my thumbnails lacked emotional pull and were way too busy.

To get a more specific breakdown I later prompted it with:

• Based on this set of thumbnails which ones stand out an why?

Resulting in a ranked list and a detailed explanation why certain images stand out against the rest. This works with the free version of ChatGPT but uses a lot of tokens so after 4-5 iterations I had to wait a day to try again.

To stack up my thumbnails against channels in my niche and collect relevant outliers I’ve been using Clickpilot* on every single video this year. It’s seriously become the backbone of my idea testing cycle and this combo lead back to a 1 out of 10 with the latest video. Honestly I could not imagine running a YouTube Creator Business without it.

But if you are just starting out or don’t have a consistent output here is a pro tip for a free way of getting there.
Create a new YouTube account and subscribe to a bunch of channels your viewers might also watch. When you are ready to post open it up to get a fresh collection of videos you might stack up against. Take your thumbnail iterations and photoshop it in.Then just give it to Chat as explained before.

Take 5 minutes today to run this test! Screenshot the homepage, drop your thumbnail in, and ask ChatGPT: Which one stands out? I’d love to hear what you discover.

*Affiliate Link

My favorite things this week

Casey Neistat asks why do we do hard things

Maurice Moves showing off this micro YouTube Setup

Jon Yousahaei Interviewing Johnny and Iz Harris

Ryan Hashemi breaking down his success with Jubilee

Are you at the Video Days Festival in Cologne next week?