Creating Effective Thumbnails for 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 who 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 could 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 wanna 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 get, we could

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, you know, 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, 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, mini things that we do, like changing the

shirt colors, you know, putting Jimmy in a suit,

putting him in a shirt with the

MrBeast logo, you know, the different color of a house,

or we change

so many different aspects. So we end up having hundreds of

thumbnails.

Mouth open, mouth closed 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, uh, 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 A/B 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, a big change. But the fact that 30 out of 30 thumbnail

changes, it all showed success with A/B 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 the-"