How about some insider baseball?
I am a YouTuber. I make YouTube videos, and if there is one thing that has changed in the last several years, it’s what is expected for how you “sell” your video. The title and thumbnail (referred to as “packaging”) are essentially the “key” to being seen now.
In years past, I regarded the thumbnail as a piece of art—a place to make something stand out and look interesting. However, since I started uploading videos regularly last year, I have found an extreme difference in expectations compared to when I last regularly uploaded.
I uploaded my newest video, a reaction to the new, 15-minute-YouTube-rant-as-an-8-minute-song Tom MacDonald #1 trending video “God Mode,” with this thumbnail:
This actually didn’t take. I also titled it “Tom MacDonald - "God Mode" (Conservative Rap Reaction),” which also didn’t take.
Over the first 24 hours, I made changes according to how/if people responded and ultimately settled on the image at the start of the post (which will also take you to my video by clicking).
So, I didn’t notice his eyes for some reason. They just did not stick out to me at all. Maybe it’s that they’re super corny, but it wasn’t until after the video was up and I was tinkering with the thumbnail that it reminded me of Mac as the Night Man.
But if I put a head on that side of Tom, it threw it way out of balance. So I put Hide The Pain Harold on the other side and shaded them both so their lighting was similar to Tom’s. The caption was just the title of the song, which is pretty generic. Why would anyone click on that? What do I have to say?
So I changed that to go with Mac as well. “Going For Gasps” will catch any Sunny fan’s eye, but if someone doesn’t understand the reference, it at least seems to say something about what they are in for: I’m talking about how much this guy wants your jaw to drop!
(I am actually talking about how this song is an example of falsely pumping up the idea of meritocracy while providing a justification for why most don’t make it – the genetically superior people are, of course, going to be at the top! But he is absolutely going for gasps.)
Beyond that, I changed the title of the video to “What's HIDDEN in Tom MacDonald's "God Mode"?” It seems like the algorithm likes that a lot better:
Making YouTube videos is a lot of fun, and little puzzles like this are enjoyable to solve from time to time. A lot of the time, you think you know how people are going to react. If I had been the first upload of a reaction, my packaging probably would have been fine, but I don’t do the type of video where that is possible anyhow.
I like to have something real to say rather than “that’s good” or “that’s bad.” Here, I was probably much more charitable than some might expect of Tom MacDonald. I like that he showed he was grateful to his family in the song, and a joke he made absolutely cracked me up, too. I try not to do a dunkfest and if there redeeming qualities to something, I think it’s worth noting them in a critique as well.
But this approach requires me to find eye-catching ways to say, “I’m going to rationally and fairly approach this,” which is nearly impossible. I can’t use the thumbnail to say, “THIS SONG IS TERRIBLE” (or something loudly negative) because that wasn’t what I said in the video. You can’t just straight-up lie to people (well, you can but I don’t). So I went for gasps!