It's kind of odd to me that the two examples shown on the page are from creators who aren't really all that clickbaity, CGP Grey and Tom Scott. Their videos typically _are_ what the title says, maybe with a slight bit of poetic license, and their thumbnails are eye catching but relevant and not too egregious.
Veritasium has a video about this and I’ve seen other creators like GothamChess and maybe even Tom Scott talk about how they have to create clickbait thumbnails otherwise they get no views. The YouTube algorithm punishes creators who don’t use clickbait.
They claim that they only create clickbait because the platform requires it, but that argument is undercut a bit by the fact that they use the same playbook on floatplane.
Stuff like that does not age well at all, and they are sacrificing longevity for immediacy. If I search for videos on a certain topic and see the 'youtube face' on the thumbnail my intuitive trust for that video plummets compared to one that looks that looks plain and informative. However someone scrolling through looking for interesting stuff to watch may be more likely to click on something attention grabbing, and people doing that a lot all at once (upon release) accelerates the trend numbers so you get a whole lot of eyeballs at the very beginning.
They are not being honest when they say they have to do it for clicks. They have to do it to monetize attention when it is most important to their brand. After that they have sacrificed any long-term value. This is also why they have to create new content all the time at all costs. It is unsustainable and why youtube creators burn out. I hope they invested their money well before that happens.
To be fair, he doesn't blame the platform in that video. He says "I need to keep titling my videos in a way that allows us to adapt to how viewers are discovering new content". It stands to reason that the same forces that influence viewers on YouTube also influence viewers on Floatplane.
At least on floatplane their video titles are a lot less misleading (not perfect but better). Unfortunately it won't make sense for them to have someone design another thumbnail when they can just use the same as on YouTube.
it's sort of true. but only if you need millions of views and to grow to be one of the dominant channels on the platform, which realistically you don't. there are youtubers I watch who just use a frame from the video and a normal title and they comfortably get views in the hundreds of thousands or more
I think this is a definition thing, because I agree with you, but the author's comment below seems to imply clickbait is anything that looks flashy. I found this definition when googling "what is clickbait" and I like it:
> Clickbait is a sensationalized headline that encourages you to click a link to an article, image, or video. Instead of presenting objective facts, clickbait headlines often appeal to your emotions and curiosity. Once you click, the website hosting the link earns revenue from advertisers, but the actual content is usually of questionable quality and accuracy. Websites use clickbait to draw in as many clicks as possible, thus increasing their ad revenue.[0]
In Tom Scott's case, the video thumbnails look flashy but are accurate and representative of the video.
I think a good example of clickbait vs non-clickbait according to this definition would be Jazza vs NerdForge. I stopped watching Jazza because he would put great looking art in the thumbnail slightly blurred out, and the actual video would be about everything except that artwork. Whereas Nerdforge will show a huge piece of beautiful art, and that's what the whole video is about.
Just because someone presents their work well doesn't mean it's clickbait. And this is an age old problem, it's the reason we have the idiom "don't judge a book by its cover". I appreciate the effort people like Tom Scott, Sebastian Lague, and Nerdforge put into their thumbnails, because a picture is worth 1000 words and they use their thumbnails to paint that picture.
CGP Grey and Tom Scott have both changed their thumbnails from their previous style to new more “click-baity” ones. I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s just what creators have to do nowadays to keep up with the state YouTube is moving toward. I think this is why the extension author chose these two as an example.
Even the Locking Picking Lawyer — about the most sober, no-nonsense youtuber has started “jazzing up” his thumbnails with goofy emoji faces… the content is still the same but even he is not immune to this, sadly.
This was a purposeful choice to demonstrate the extent of the clickbait/sensationalism problem. Both channels have only changed their thumbnail and title style in the last few months, and previously had great titles and thumbnails.
Edit: To clarify, when I say "clickbait" here, I am using it as a neutral term referring to any materials used to convince someone to click on a link. I understand that it is kind of a loaded term and it is not used anywhere in the extension itself because of this.
The title of this post seems to be taken from the satire title on my YouTube video demo. If you install the plugin and view the video from there, there is a better title. It was meant as a demo of the extension.
I like more descriptive titles! Don't know if I agree about the thumbnail though. Replacing a "You won't believe what they do here!!" with "A tour of X facility where Y is produced plus an interview with Z" is much better. It's more expressive, easier to find what you're looking for, and overall a definitive improvement for the viewer.
However, I'm not sure a random screenshot, or any still frame from the middle of a video is a better replacement for a custom thumbnail.
The only benefit I see of something like that is to explicitly reduce irritation of stupid thumbnails, not to improve your ability to find content you care for. And if you get emotionally worked up enough because of stupid youtube thumbnails that you must change them to something that's obviously just as random, you might need more meditation. It's just youtube, it's not worth it.
Looking at Tom Scott now I don't really see it. Most of the thumbnails seems to be him next to the object, an arrow highlighting it and a short fact about it. On the contrary, seeing the submarine in the thumbnail with this plugin kinda spoil the ending of his video.
Even then, Tom Scott is still not the worst out there, which makes the demonstration less convincing. Show a channel full of shocked-face thumbnails, where the effect is much more visible, and now we’re talking.
I guess I haven't noticed any difference, and what I see on their channels today isn't what I consider clickbait. IMO it's at least a step or two from clickbait.
While I’m just as annoyed about the clickbait problem as everyone else, it is worth noting that it’s hard to blame it on the individual YouTubers. If you don’t follow whatever the algorithm demands that given week, you’re unlikely to get very many views at all. Even subscription notifications are fed into the algorithm now, and YouTube has been proven to be perfectly willing to not send out notifications for videos it seems unworthy. This even affects subscribers who turned the bell on, a feature that was supposedly released to mitigate the first time they implemented that change by supposedly offering an “always force notifications for this channel’s uploads” option, but YouTube’s guidance now says that the bell only guarantees receiving all notifications generated by a channel while also stating that not all uploads will generate a notification.[1]
Linus Tech Tips famously ran an experiment several years ago (and I believe have rerun it a few times since then) and determined that, even though they hated doing it, videos which used clickbait titles and thumbnails got consistently got 20% higher engagement than ones that didn’t use clickbait.[2] I’ve also heard anecdotal numbers even higher than that, and there’s a knock-on effect as YouTube tends to promote channels with consistently high performance way more frequently (this is why big Game Theory uploads instantly and consistently show up in everyone’s recommendations).
This isn’t a complaint about your tool at all, don’t misunderstand me. I just wanted to point out that most of these big channels are their creator’s primary business, and it’s gotten very difficult to be successful at YouTube without resorting to algorithm tricks like these.
Edit: Ah, yeah, I missed your “It's no one's fault. It's a system that creates a race to the bottom.” text on the page. You already probably know all of this.
I will add an addendum in response to “Many have even started going through their entire backlog, changing old titles and thumbnails to be more attention grabbing and vague.” because I actually know how that got started.
About a year or two ago, the late great Minecraft streamer Technoblade ran into an issue where it turned out that one of the community-made thumbnails on one of his videos had used traced art. He quickly sourced a replacement piece and updated the thumbnail, but then quickly noticed something interesting happen: YouTube treated the thumbnail update almost like a new upload, and that video showed back up in people’s recommendations, accordingly with a massive bump in views. He tried this with a few other videos, sometimes changing the title as well, and got similar results.
Other YouTubers began to copy this strategy, and it was ultimately discovered that updating the title or thumbnail caused Google to “re-crunch” the video in terms of the algorithm, and applying the most popular current title and thumbnail styles were led to a serious increase in recommendations and views, even if the video was several years old by that point. Many YouTubers began to abuse this, updating their videos with “modern” metadata stylings, and since then it’s become standard practice for big YouTubers and has led to a serious increase in growth for them.
Once again, it’s an algorithm problem and not an individual YouTuber problem, but that’s what started the most recent trend of editing the metadata on old videos rather than just applying it to new uploads.
I read recently that after himself making a video about clickbait on Youtube, Tom Scott joined the bandwagon and has started going back through his videos clickbaitifying the thumbnails
I agree that CGP Grey isn't the best example though, his thumbnails seem to just broadly be those little cartoons as they always were
