YouTube 썸네일 테스트: 주요 결과 및 인사이트

### YouTube 미리보기 이미지의 과학: 지금까지 알아낸 사실
* 🔍 ABC 썸네일 테스터 도구를 사용하면 **크리에이터가 동영상에 여러 개의 썸네일을 업로드**하고 **가장 실적이 좋은 썸네일만 보관**할 수 있습니다.
* 👁 ️↪f_200D↩🗨️ 최고의 미리보기 이미지는 **콘텐츠를 가장 잘 판매**하고 시청자가 가능한 한 오랫동안 **YouTube를 시청하게 하는 미리보기 이미지**입니다.
* 🎭 **시선 방향, 스토리텔링 등의 요소**에 따라 시청자의 썸네일 선호도가 달라질 수 있습니다.
* 🎨 얼굴 표정, 색상, 텍스트, 아이콘 등 미리보기 이미지의 모든 요소는 **정보를 전달하고 흥미를 유발하는 그림**을 그리는 데 도움이 됩니다.
* 👍 핵심 시청자(구독자)는 **미리보기 이미지에 덜 신경**을 쓰는 반면, 신규 시청자에게는 **선명도가 중요**합니다.
* 🍬 미리보기 이미지와 제목은 동영상의 포장과 같아서 클릭을 유도하는 데 중요하지만 **시청자 유지에 영향을 미치는 유일한 요소**는 아닙니다.
* 🛠 ABC 썸네일 테스터에는 **비클릭, 구독자 대 신규 시청자 분석이 표시되지 않고 3개의 이미지**만 허용하는 등의 제한이 있습니다.
* 🔮 YouTube는 이 도구를 계속 개발할 예정이며, **크리에이터가 실험을 진행**하면서 시간이 지남에 따라 그 결과가 발전할 수 있습니다.

YouTube의 썸네일 실험에 따르면 시청자는 모호하거나 오해의 소지가 있는 영상보다 명확하고 매력적인 비주얼을 선호합니다.

ah, I have been doing this for a long time, and I still do not know how to make the perfect thumbnail. Do I add some big red arrow, maybe a big smile, maybe like this? Perhaps a touch of Z. Wait, no. Of course, I'll use YouTube's ABC thumbnail tester. I mean, sure, it's twice as much work for our thumbnail artist, Maria, but hey, you don't mind, right? Um, actually, L know some great while you get that going. I'm going to explain to the good people what exactly it is that we're up to with our little experiment. Late last year, we were given access to a tool that allows us to upload multiple thumbnails for the same video and then keep only the one that performs the best. And we've spent many hours experimenting with some sometimes confusing results. I mean, at times, the winner is painfully obvious, but other times, it is impossible to decipher just what the heck you guys liked about the thumbnail of choice, just like it's impossible to determine when I'm going to segue to our sponsor. See, I gotta that.

wasn't the segue. [Music] MSI does your gaming prowess need some divine intervention. MSI's Meg z790 Godlike Max motherboard might not actually make you a gaming deity, but we'd like to imagine that if there was such a thing, they'd be using one. Go check it out in the description below. Let's kick things off with a result that still has us flummoxed. Belle's AMD Tech upgrade features him either on the left or on the right, and the people have spoken. And Belle on the right is our big winner with 56.9% of the shared total watch time. That means that those of you who watched it were served either of these two thumbnails during our test, and the ones who clicked on this one stuck around for significantly longer. Or wait, hold on a second, stuck around longer? Yeah, well, here's the thing. If YouTube gave creators a tool that just chose a winning thumbnail based on the click-through rate, we would be straight back to the Dark Ages within a matter of

hours, so instead, they built an incentive for this tool that aligns with their agenda, which is, of course, to keep you watching YouTube for as long as possible. So, the best thumbnail is the one that best sells the content that you're about to enjoy coming back to Bell. Then he thinks it's obviously because his left side is his better side. Who could blame him? He's right, but we think that it could have more to do with how the viewer's eye gets directed. Most of our audience speaks English, which means that they probably read from left to right on the page. So, a thumbnail that communicates in order, there is a strong correlation between the title and concept. This is almost certainly a Linus Tech Tips video, and he's going to do an upgrade that makes a member of his team happy, might outperform one that communicates, Here's a guy who's happy and doesn't look very stealthy. Oh, by the way, I think that's Linus standing in an empty room, maybe. I don't know for

this one your guess is as good as mine and I would love to hear your theories down below. Hey you, yeah you, if you want to hear more of our theories, Maria and I will be filming a closer look about the thumbnails we don't talk about in this video. Get subscribed to on Float Plane so you don't miss it, and check out some of our other content while you wait. Let's change gears though and look at an easier one, the Scorpion chair. We pitted a pallet of unopened boxes against the chair in all of its glory. Now, conventional clickbait wisdom might be to give away as little information as possible in hopes of enticing you with curiosity, but as you can see, the chair thumbnail won by a landslide with 69.2% of the shared watch time. And in this case, it's kind of obvious if you think about it. You see the chair, you click the chair, you stay for the chair. You see a pallet of boxes, you click a pallet of boxes, you get a weird.

chair. Well, see you later. It is entirely possible that the mystery boxes may have driven more clicks, maybe a lot more clicks, and they could have even resulted in more counted views. But the cold hard truth is that YouTube doesn't want to build tools that help an individual creator get lots of views. They want to build tools to increase viewer satisfaction on the platform as a whole, which is a good thing. It's just that it's really hard to do. As it turned out, the vast majority of our tests were much more evenly split, even in cases where we uploaded dramatically different images. Check out this one. I didn't even realize that we had started this test until I saw this thumbnail on my feed for reacting to our best PC builds ever. Thumbnail one is the big open mouth that I saw, while thumbnail two is a more relaxed natural smile. I thought for sure that this one would help us end the cringe versus natural debate once and for all, but as it turns out, y'all mostly just kind of don't care. The LT audience.

seems to slightly prefer a closed mouth or a natural smile versus a big wide oace one like this, but typically by just 1 or 2% more watch time. Emoting in different ways does see some disparity, but it seems like it's less about lots of emotion and more about ensuring that the emotion or the mood suits the video. When we replaced our office PCs with Dell Optiplex, the neutral face ended up outperforming the disgusted face, so maybe negativity is bad. But then for the $150,000 server video, a frustrated or upset thumbnail did way better than the one in which I'm smiling. In some ways, we've actually ended up with more questions than we had when we started. What we think is happening though is that some expressions help us tell a better story, and there's a lot more to it than just changing a face. Every element of the thumbnail helps paint a picture that informs and entices. Maybe this background color was just too aggro for a chill video like this one about Cable Management where I'm relaxing at.

my desk in a bathrobe. People did not like the razor Green version and strongly prefer a more calming dark blue. If we choose to use text or icons in our thumbnails, we've got to ask ourselves, do we need that big question mark? Could we label things more clearly? Is text even necessary, or is the title of the video enough? Another big part of our experiment has been adding red arrows pointing at the subject of the video. That, it turns out, though, seems like a big no-no when the subject or the item in question is super obvious, like, okay, the building behind you, clearly Smash Champs, and yeah, that Meta Quest 3 on your face, you're obviously going to be talking about that. We don't need a red arrow to know that you can get this super comfy dip-dye hoodie from LTT store.com, do you? Clarity is hugely important, but no one wants to be beaten over the head with it. With that said, arrows pointing out small objects that aren't instantly recognizable, those are 100% fair game. And yeah, most of this is

kind of just graphic design 2011. The thumbnail is there to entice you, draw the eye, but not mislead or add anything unnecessary. Just never hurts to have a refresher course. So the TL;DD are for our whole experiment boils down to a few key points. Number one, our core audience doesn't seem to care that much about the thumbnail. In our first round of tests, the watch time share was pretty close to 50/50. So either we're so good at thumbnails that we can't make a bad one if we try, or more likely, our loyal subscribers know they want to watch LTT, and if they click the video, they're going to watch a decent amount of it, whether my mouth is open or closed, or I'm happy or sad, or deranged, or whatever. Point number two, for those outside of our core audience, like the people being served our video on the YouTube homepage, thanks to the almighty algorithm. Alm Alor, for those folks, clarity is king. They don't want to gamble on whether

they're going to like what they're about to watch, and if they can't tell what's going to happen, or if they get 10-20 seconds into the video and they feel misled, the odds of them sticking around are pretty low. Point number three: at the end of the day, it's all just packaging. It's important, but it's not that important. You can think of the thumbnail and title of a video kind of like a candy wrapper. I mean, it's one thing to get somebody to buy your chocolate bar because it has shiny packaging, but it is something else entirely to keep them coming back for more or recommending your candy to their friends. And of course, all of this needs to be taken as preliminary results. While this ABC thumbnail tester is good and we are going to continue to use it, it could be better because currently it doesn't tell us some pretty important stuff. Like, it doesn't tell us if anyone was served either thumbnail and didn't click at all. It doesn't break the numbers down by

subscriber versus new viewer, and it's limited to just three images. I mean, imagine how much more we could learn if we could upload, say, 10 thumbnails at a time, or if we could manually choose a specific thumbnail or set of thumbnails for the core audience, and then something totally different for new viewers. All of this is almost certainly in YouTube's best interest, and I fully expect them to continue to develop this tool. And I also fully expect that as creators continue to experiment, the small details are going to change, even if the overall findings prove to be a constant, kind of like I constantly segue to our sponsor Squarespace. It's 2024, and your brand or business needs online presence. Listen, I don't make the rules; we just play by them. Building your own website may seem daunting, but Squarespace is there to make it easier than figuring out just how come your printer never works when you want it to. Okay, maybe not the best example, but yeah, it's super easy. Squarespace is the easy-to-use platform.

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It's Time to End Cringe Thumbnail Faces... and YouTube has the Solution

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.


Linus Tech Tips

YouTube 썸네일 마스터하기: A/B 테스트 및 시청자 참여

이제 크리에이터는 동영상에 여러 개의 미리보기 이미지를 업로드하고 시청 시간을 기준으로 가장 실적이 좋은 미리보기 이미지를 유지할 수 있습니다.

YouTube의 미리보기 이미지 테스터는 시청자가 플랫폼에 더 오래 머무르게 하는 것을 목표로 하며, 가장 적합한 미리보기 이미지 선택에 영향을 미칩니다.

미리보기 이미지의 성공 여부는 클릭률뿐만 아니라 시각적 방향, 제목 및 컨셉의 전달력 등의 요소를 고려하여 콘텐츠를 얼마나 잘 판매하고 시청자의 참여를 유도하는지에 따라 결정됩니다.

크리에이터는 종종 시청자를 유치하기 위해 클릭베이트 전략을 사용하지만, 성공의 열쇠는 시청자를 만족시키는 것입니다.

YouTube는 개별 크리에이터의 조회수보다 시청자 만족도를 우선시합니다.

시청자의 선호도가 다양하기 때문에 다양한 미리보기 이미지 전략이 시청자 참여도에 큰 영향을 미치지 않을 수 있습니다.

얼굴 표정과 썸네일이 동영상 성능에 미치는 영향

미리보기 이미지의 얼굴 표정은 시청자 참여에 미치는 영향은 미미하며, 강렬한 표정보다는 적절한 감정이 더 중요합니다.

썸네일에서 빨간색 화살표를 사용하는 것은 명백한 피사체에는 불필요하지만 잘 알아볼 수 없는 물체를 강조하는 데는 유용합니다.

썸네일의 전반적인 효과는 배경색, 텍스트, 아이콘 사용과 같은 요소를 포함하여 명확하고 매력적인 시각적 스토리를 만드는 데 달려 있습니다.

동영상 마케팅에서 썸네일의 중요성

미리보기 이미지는 핵심 오디언스를 끌어들이는 데는 중요하지만, 시청 결정에 미치는 영향은 적습니다.

핵심 오디언스가 아닌 시청자의 경우 오해의 소지를 방지하고 리텐션을 높이려면 미리보기 이미지의 명확성이 중요합니다.

궁극적으로 썸네일은 초기 조회수를 유도하는 데 필수적하지만, 시청자의 참여를 유도하고 더 많은 정보를 얻기 위해 다시 돌아오게 하는 것은 콘텐츠 품질입니다.

YouTube 크리에이터를 위한 썸네일 업로드 극대화하기

크리에이터는 YouTube에 한 번에 3개 이상의 미리보기 이미지를 업로드할 수 있는 기능을 원합니다.

또한 핵심 시청자와 신규 시청자를 위한 특정 미리보기 이미지 선택 옵션도 원합니다.

이러한 썸네일 선택의 유연성은 YouTube에 가장 유리할 것으로 예상되며 향후 개발될 가능성이 높습니다.