Thumbnail Design and A/B Testing in Videos

And when you're making a thumbnail for that, do you make like

10 versions first and try to see which one you think is more appealing?

Do you try to make sure the thumbnail and the title are similar so they reinforce

each other or they contrast so that maybe someone

doesn't like the thumbnail will still get caught up by the title?

How do you think about those sorts of things?

Yeah, so our ideation process is where we spend most of the time coming up with

that title and

thumbnail. So it's like idea, then you get the title and thumbnail. And we try so

many different thumbnails, like how can we represent this

content the best? How can we make it clickable?

And so we probably come up with like 50

concepts per video, which is excessive. And I'm not saying everyone has to do that.

But that's just the level that we're at. We're like

trying to come up with unique ways to get people to click on the video. And

then after that,

we're putting it into concept art, which then says like, hey,

like, so first we get someone to draw it up and it's like an illustrator.

And then we do concept art,

which we like Photoshop with like really rough assets to try to say,

is this actually going to look good? Like we don't want to waste Jimmy's time.

So let's make sure that this thumbnail looks good.

And then once we're like, yes, this is clickable.

And right now we're trying to do like three thumbnails so we can use the A

B testing feature from YouTube.

And so once we have three that we really like,

that's when we actually then shoot source.

Every single one of our videos,

we don't go off of Google to find images and try to make things work.

We shoot our own source in studio.

So that way we get the angles we want and

we don't have to make any sacrifices to the idea in the thumbnail idea that we had.

And so then we can bring it to life, fully polish it up and then

make a final thumbnail.

And then there's also like many things that we do, like changing the shirt colors,

putting Jimmy in a suit,

putting him in a shirt with the Mr. Beast logo, the different color of a house,

or we change so many different aspects.

So we ended up having hundreds of thumbnails. Famously.

Yeah, the mouth closed and mouth open, exactly.

What was that like for you, that experience? Oh, it was so funny.

I was the one fighting internally for a

mouth open and Jimmy kept talking to me and saying like, I think we should

close the mouth. And then as soon as AB testing came out, he was like, let's

run the test. And I was like, awesome, let's do it. And it was funny because the

change was insane because we did it for about like 30 videos and all 30

of them with the closed mouth actually led to higher watch time on the video.

And so it was a small difference,

but 30 in a row gave us the signal of like,

okay, if it was like half and half,

then it maybe wasn't a big change.

But the fact that 30 out of 30 thumbnail changes, it all showed

success with AB testing. It was something that really stood out to us like,

okay. And I was able to admit I'm wrong, you know, like Jimmy, you won that one.