Linus Tech Tips
1 HN recommender · recommended in 7 months, 2019–2023
14:28 · 1.4M views · Apr 19, 2017
Linus Tech Tips addresses criticism of its clickbait-style thumbnails in an Honest Answers episode, explaining that the YouTube algorithm pushes creators toward them.
Referenced in clickbait and YouTube-algorithm debates as a candid creator explanation of why good channels use poor thumbnails.
9 comments from Hacker News
Here's the video where Linus goes into it: this video I'll give him credit for being straight about it.
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
Sebastian and Linus Media Group seem to be pretty frank and open about a lot of this: see for instance this video on putting up gurning thumbnails and navigating the YT algorithm (and that whole playlist, including a revenue breakdown [LINK] ), the Gamers Nexus video on LTT's production process [LINK] and the coverage LTT regularly lavishes on its own production setup and process, from a nearly-12m video about the awkwardness of ingesting video from their new 12K cameras [LINK] to seemingly quite genuine fly-on-the-wall coverage of temporarily losing their data to a RAID failure [LINK] . Obviously you always have to take anyone's self-presentation with a grain of salt. But they're certainly not hiding the fact that there's a more grounded reality behind the "on" personas.
I've followed them for a while now on youtube and it has been interesting to watch them evolve their format, content, and presentation to appease youtube's algorithms. They have been pretty open [1] about how they don't like some of the changes they have had to make to stay popular on youtube. I hope they roll back some of the more annoying changes. It appears that the ugly thumbnails sadly still persist in on floatplane [2]. It would also gladly pay for a return to 5 minute videos vs the now standard 15+ min length that gets a middle youtube ad-break and increased revenue. [1] this video [2] [LINK]
He talks about the youtube algorithm being the primary driver for the shitty thumbnails this video vs his traditional one that got buried. Not sure about his other stuff you claim, I'm not a super big video guy for tech things (just let me skip and search ahead easily) but this came up with my friends a few years ago after people started noticing many videos from various creators going to this format of thumbnail.