$2,000 thumbnail competition

I’d be super excited to work with someone who can show amazing taste and skill.

$2,000 thumbnail competition.

Make 5 amazing thumbnails for my YouTube channel.

The winner will be hired to make the thumbnails for future episodes.

I’d be super excited to work with someone who can show amazing taste and skill.

Details

Deadline

September 15th

Prize

• 1st place: $1,500

• 2nd place: $250

• 3rd place: $250

The person I’ll hire will be 1 of these 3.

What to submit

• 5 Thumbnails:

  • Sally Paine main episode.

  • Most recent Tyler Cowen main episode.

  • Sally Paine clip on Taiwan.

  • David Reich clip on why no other humans survived.

  • 1 thumbnail for any video on my channel of your choice - find something you think we really messed up on! (>5000 views, or within the last 6 months)

• Often you need to coordinate titles with new thumbnails. If this is the case for yours, the form will allow you to suggest different titles that I should test with your thumbnail.

Where to submit

Here

How you’ll be judged

60% based on my own judgment, 40% based on A/B test results. For high quality submissions, I’m going to setup A/B tests. The metric I’ll be tracking is Watch Time Share Percentage.

FAQ

If I’m missing something here, please ping me at hello@dwarkeshpatel.com, and I’ll add more info.

What style of thumbnails?

The goal of this competition is to figure out what style will work best. I’m not confident the current theme you see on our most recent videos is what will perform best. So I’d love to see you try new styles, color schemes, photo effects, captions (both content and style), etc.

That being said, giving some sense that this is a live interview (with cleaned screenshots from the video, etc) is good idea.

What to avoid

Don’t make slop. Often people put 5 million things in their thumbnail, with super distracting backgrounds. Someone scrolling by cannot discern any clear thing which compels them to click.

Do you mind click-baity stuff?

As long as it’s not dishonest (and especially if it doesn’t feature the guest in a way they would really not be comfortable with). Other than that my tolerance is pretty high for click bait.

But it has to be click bait that actually works - low quality flashy captions can often perform worse than something understated by intriguing.

Who to learn from

In terms of who should be replicated, I’ll leave that up to you. But it’s clear that channels like Johnny Harris or Marques Brownlee have figured something out. I’m not good enough at this to know what it is, but hopefully you can figure it out and win the competition!

About the job

Since the purpose of this competition is to hire someone, let me tell you what the job will involve:

• About 3-5 videos a week (2-4 clips, 1 episode)

  • You will make enough variations of each one to have an A/B/C test associated with it.

• You will be well paid.