Mass replacing thumbnails

[LearningStuff]

Good idea or no?

I'm been re-working my thumbnails so they have a consistent branding across all of my videos. I know that replacing a thumbnail is important to YouTube and I'm not sure how it affects the standings of videos in the search engine and elsewhere. I admit I've been lazy about thumbnails, sometimes I've created a custom one but most of the time I've just grabbed one of the screenshots that YT lets me select.

I'm talking about replacing the thumbnails of 100+ videos.

 

[mirrorlessNY(youtuber)]

interesting idea, I replaced/edited many older video thumbs, can be a lot of work though

 

[Rhody Seth]

Is it worth it? I dunno. i suppose if you're still getting a decent amount of hits on those old videos then there may be a benefit to updating the thumbnails as well. Otherwise I'm guessing it won't make much of a difference as to whether the algorithm does you a solid. When it comes to my videos I have a "past is the past" mentality. I'll put my effort into improving my content going forward. The content I've already put out there - it is what it is.

 

[Tito Tims Videos]

I updated a dozen or so as an experiment (tags, titles, and thumbnails). It did not seem to help, but it did not hurt. I try to concentrate on the new vids. I agree with the past is the past...

YouTube has said that updating the info on a vid does not cause the analytics to reevaluate the vid, but it may affect how people that see it respond to it, which will give it a bump. If the vid is not getting much response, it could not really hurt it to try.

 

[LearningStuff]

Thanks for the advice! For my channel personally the older videos are very important at drawing in views since they pretty much last forever, my videos aren't timely or anything like a news or say a crypto channel. I'm trying to build up a very large collection of videos that will be found in thousands of possible search terms.

I go back to my old videos from time to time to see if I can improve SEO on them in the titles, descriptions and tags (if tags actually do anything, that's unclear). This includes whether the thumbnail could be improved.

At the minimum my thought is that it's probably good if someone could identify one of your videos just by glancing at the thumbnail which is done with a consistent style throughout. For now I will just make my thumbnails very consistent going forward and slowly replace the older ones and track whether they fall out of favor to any degree.