I was asked why I come to this forum when I don’t like playing arena. This thread is a good example of why. Magnificent displays of insanity.
I don’t hate Venruki
I do hate his cringy YouTube thumbnails where he’s looking at the camera doing the Lightskin gaze
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Gotta do it or people don’t click.
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Blame the algorithm and the mouth breathers who can’t stop themselves from clicking for heavily favouring soy faces. A video without a cringe soyboi face thumbnail gets like half the views.
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
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Is that something people actually care about? I’ve never given whatever it is you guys are discussing much thought.
Also, weren’t you taught as a young child to NOT judge a book by its cover?
Not consciously, but putting these open mouth faces on your thumbnails will dramatically increase view count. I just know because I’ve done online marketing/SEO stuff before, and throwing a stupid face on the ad was like a 2x roi increase on adspend
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I don’t consider Venruki or the guy who makes his videos for him as marketing gurus tho. They probably do it because it’s trendy in the community to have your thumbnail like that.
It doesnt matter tho. Don’t think the thumbnail is a thing to cry about. Everyone on YouTube uses clickbait because they want you to see their video in order to create ad revenue. I can keep going, but it’s just dumb to me.
Sure, but the reason it’s trendy is because it works
Not necessarily.
But that is necessarily the answer here lol, it’s a stupid cringe thing, but it also works. One thing Google is really good at is giving you mountains of analytical data, and you can see exactly what is and isn’t working from their creator dashboards. I HIGHLY doubt ven isnt looking at this and being oblivious to the huge spikes in viewers when he puts up dumb mouth wide open thumbnails
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Correlation doesn’t imply causation.
Pumpkin pie is best served directly into the garbage can.
But all causation involves some correlation
Really what it comes down to is that it’s cheap and easy way of creating a thumbnail that is trendy and tends to work. Imo it has more to do with what’s in trend. I bet you there are different thumbnail formats that perform better and people don’t use them because they take actual effort to make.
So you want to do pistols at dawn?
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There are, but they’re generally banned from being able to be put in ads/thumbnails or from being monetized. There’s a bunch of rules like you cant allude to health/wellness, can’t make promises of making money, or stuff like “you’ll be poor if you don’t watch this video!”, etc
I really think it has to do with it being easy and trendy rather it being used because it works. Hopefully that makes sense.
I get that, but my argument is that it if it didn’t work, it wouldnt be trendy
Work relative to what tho? Will it work better than having no thumbnail? Prob. There are better options, this one is just low effort and I agree does generate results.
Relative to anything else people were doing before that doesn’t get you demonetized/shadow banned. Sure, maybe it’s the easy road, but this thread alone is a testament to its effect (were talking about it right now). There’s probably a whole psychology argument to be made here that I’m not really qualified to speak to (I just know marketing somewhat), but creating an emotional response in your audience is like #1 of good marketing. Even if people hate it, a portion of those will hate-watch the content, where if it’s just a normal dude doing a normal pose, it doesn’t grab as much attention