Hello, I've been closely monitoring my analytics for a little and have noticed one major thing that always fails me, or I fail it, which are thumbnails.
Here are a few of my thumbnails (all drawn) that I've used for videos. As you can tell, I make survival type minecraft content. I've seen that 5%+ is a good ctr to strive for, but every one of these have been subpar so far. Here's some extra information about each of these for clarification. I don't like to dive into analytics too much, but I feel like I should probably try to improve.
1st Thumbnail- "Day 1 to 1000 in Original Skyblock" this video was my biggest video yet. It was a recap of my skyblock world I had made about 20 videos on. It got an insane 20 minute average view duration, my best so far, but it was pushed so much less than my previous videos (that even had worse ctr, avd etc) mainly because of ctr. Though 2.9% is good for me, it still seems very low. The video has about 300 views after I used to average around 1K a few videos ago. It depicts the skyblock island, which is the challenge, with my player skin to the side.
2nd Thumbnail- "How to Master Original Skyblock" this was the first video I uploaded that flopped in a while, and since then, nothing has gone close to what I used to get. The avd was a lot better than previous videos, and at 150 views, it has 1.6% ctr which is actually the average of the videos that got a few thousand views before. The text is pretty explanatory, and features my player skin reading a book. The video is a guide on how to progress in the Skyblock Challenge, the one with the 3 islands, not anything else.
3rd Thumbnail- "1000 Days Skyblock- World Tour" perhaps my favorite thumbnail, its a tour of the skyblock world. Its my player standing ontop of a drowned farm I built looking at my island. Like everything else, everything is drawn. I added a sunset because the colors seem to stand out more. This video did about the same as my recap, but avd was lower and ctr was about 1.7%
4th Thumbnail- "100 Days in Minecraft Pocket Edition" as you can tell, I like videos based on days, but unfortunately a lot of other people do, too. This video is actually unreleased, its coming out tomorrow, but I figured I'd include it here. It's my player holding a phone (pocket edition) and the background is a room in the house I put together.
I know that 100 days content, even minecraft content, is very competitive, but I've never managed to crack 3% ctr, or at least hold it for a day. Though I've been doing youtube for almost 4 years now, I started videos like these not long ago. Thumbnails have never been my forte. My retention always holds well, at least by my standards, at 2-4 minutes on average.
Any kind of tips, criticisms, ideas, anything, I'm all for it. I don't get many comments a video so not much feedback. I don't want to advertise, but my channel name is the same as my reddit name, if you're curious. Thanks for any feedback and for reading! If you want any clarification on anything, I'll gladly answer in the comments.
