Captain Thumbnail is an easy-to-use tool to help you select the best thumbnail image for your YouTube video. We think that a good thumbnail can greatly increase the reach of your video. Captain Thumbnail lets you leverage the power of state of the art artificial intelligence (AI) to choose the optimal thumbnail, and maximize the chance that your audience will notice & enjoy your content. 😊
It is no secret that the success of a YouTube video depends in no small part on its thumbnail image.
Professional creators on YouTube dedicate an enormous amount of time and effort on optimizing their
video thumbnails. One way you might approach this is to systematically study the effects of
different thumbnail designs yourself. But that is a very ambitious endeavor. You could perform A/B
testing with different thumbnail designs, but for reliable results, you need an experienced data
analyst. In fact, because you cannot simply roll out different thumbnail designs to different user
groups (as is common in conventional product analytics research), it is fairly difficult to collect
reliable data.
In contrast, Captain Thumbnail is very easy to use, and requires no expert knowledge. We have
already done the hard work for you - we have analyzed large amounts of data to figure out how to
distinguish good from bad thumbnails. Our experienced social media and data science
professionals have built an AI model that can estimate the quality of a potential thumbnail image.
Instead of hiring a data analyst, with just a few clicks you can now leverage the power of AI to
choose the best thumbnail for your YouTube video.
Simply upload one or several images, and our AI model will score your thumbnails within
seconds. You have several images and can’t choose which one to use? Simply upload all of them, and
pick the one with the highest score. 💯
You will get a score between 0 and 100 for each of your thumbnail images. A higher score means a
better image. But a thumbnail that’s perfect for, let’s say a Gaming YouTube channel, might
obviously be out of place for a Fashion channel. Therefore, Captain Thumbnail also analyzes which
video genre your thumbnail image most likely represents (e.g. “People & Blogs”, “Entertainment”,
“Gaming”, etc.). If your uploaded image gets a high score, and the video category matches your
content, that’s an indication that it’s well designed image. 👌
One last thing to keep in mind: Our AI model has learned from an enormous amount of data, and has
an in-depth understanding of what a good YouTube thumbnail image should look like. But you know your
audience best. When you decide on your thumbnail design, use your intuition along the AI power of
Captain Thumbnail. Choose an image that intuitively feels like a good fit for your channel, and
that gets a high score from Captain Thumbnail’s AI model. ☯️
If you encounter a case where Captain Thumbnail gives you a really high score, but the video
performs below expectations, feel free to give us feedback. We’re always striving to further improve
Captain Thumbnail. 💪
We developed a specialized deep neural network (also known as artificial intelligence) to calculate a
score between 0 and 100 for each of your thumbnail images. The score is based mainly on the number
of views a video represented by a particular thumbnail is expected to reach. Of course, you also
need a good title and content 😉 but we think that a great thumbnail image will get you a long way.
Thumbnail images are probably the main factor when a user decides which videos in their feed to
click.
YouTube is a vast space with so many different types of content, and it’s not one-size-fits-all.
Therefore, Captain Thumbnail does not only calculate a score. When analyzing an image, the neural
network recognises which video genre the image is best suited for. Of course, there can be some
overlap between video categories. Imagine you are producing a video on computer game development.
Captain Thumbnail might think that your thumbnail image is best suited for “Gaming” or “Science &
Technology” - both make perfect sense. However, if your computer game development thumbnail gets
categorized as “Comedy”, maybe you should overthink your thumbnail style. 🤔
Our neural network has learned a lot about what a good thumbnail image looks like, and you can
easily leverage all this knowledge for your next video. Just upload some sample images, and see for
yourself. 📈