$h!tty Thumbnails on Linus Tech Tips - Honest Answers Ep. 5

What people said

bilegeek · 2021-02 · Recommendation

Here's the video where Linus goes into it: [VIDEO] I'll give him credit for being straight about it.

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Nathan2055 · 2023-06 · Reference

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

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ortusdux · 2023-06 · Criticism

Linus as well. [VIDEO] 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.

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