The creators of SponsorBlock did it again, now we can crowdsource better titles and thumbnails as well. I just tried it with LinusTechTips who is a worst offender when it comes to clickbait and its really great.
Compare without DeArrow
and with the extension
LTT makes good videos that are hidden behind obnoxious thumbnails. I hate how it's sometimes impossible to tell what a video is about because the title is so vague, but I understand why they do it. He has a company to run, he has employees to pay. He has said multiple times that he doesn't like it, but it would be a stupid to not do it because a bright colored thumbnail with a face going :O gets way more views than anything else. Clickbait haters are such a small minority that it's worth doing because 95% of people don't care
Most youtubers don't like it, but the numbers don't lie: it works.
If your business model requires clicks and views, you are pretty much forced to do what is proven to work.
A few weeks ago they did a video about mech keyboards, without the face or clickbait title, and it was performing much worse after 3 days than even the daily video. The difference was in the hundreds of thousands of views.
Even now, it is one of the worst in terms of views from the past month (excluding the last 3 days, which will probably increase in views still) with 1.1M views, against the 2nd lowest which has 1.2M views, but it is a video about Mac gaming, and that isn't a particularly performing topic.
Yeah people get mad at click bait but it's called that for a reason, it works. Probably an unpopular opinion in this thread but I don't find LTT's too bad.
I love LTT. It's entertaining, and he shows cool stuff. And you can even learn a thing or two.
And I am gonna be even more unpopular than you.
I find Steve from GN to be boring as fuck to watch regularly (though I watch him when I want to see a specific review, like I do with other channels, his content is very good in terms of information), and he resorts to clickbait regularly, even if a different kind of clickbait (that waste of sand thumbnail, if it was LTT, would be criticized forever).
And more, even if you want to buy something instead of watching for entertainment, you shouldn't rely on 1 single review anyway, so pretending GN is the be-all-end-all for tech reviews is ridiculous.