The Title, Thumbnail and Hook before YouTube

What makes a video attractive to watch comes down to mostly title, thumbnail, and hook as many YouTube strategists proclaim. I realised this concept has been true even way before YouTube existed, if we look at movies. YouTube was first created in 2005 and only started taking off from 2010 onwards, whereas movies have been made since the 1900s. Movies come with a title and poster too, and that poster is essentially the thumbnail of the movie to make people want to watch.

The movie trailer on the other hand is the hook that makes people want to go buy a ticket to watch the full thing. Similarly, the hook of a YouTube video is the first 15 to 30 seconds that people determine whether they should sit through the rest of the video.

When a movie is good, people talk about it i.e. share with others and recommend they give it a watch too. This is exactly the same for YouTube videos too. One difference though is the platform. Movies appear on cinema and have a limited runtime, whereas YouTube videos live almost forever online, if the creator does not delete it, so the runtime is almost unlimited. Another difference is there are billions of YouTube videos up there, whereas there are maybe only 1 million movies that have ever been created and published on DVD. So it’s even more competitive to get noticed on YouTube, whereas there’s only limited shelf-life of movies in cinemas before it transits to DVD or streaming platforms.

One clear takeaway is that the importance of title, thumbnail, and hook features of a video is not new. It has been around since movies were created, and movies with higher sales and views tend to have better title and thumbnail. The hook maybe isn’t as important as not everyone would watch the trailer before going to the cinema, but the thumbnail is probably the main factor people see before deciding whether to pay for the ticket with their time or money.