Game Theory Mockups

In an attempt to better my thumbnail designs, I studied the way Theorist Media made their thumbnails and tried to replicate their style for one of my articles, "Creators in Gaming: Lessons in Retention From The Industry's Most Engaging Games."
An excerpt from my Instagram post explaining my design process going into this:

"Things I’ve noticed about their thumbnails that stood out when attempting to replicate their style.

- No more than 3 words, usually never one word. My guess as to why? If you have more than three it looks more like an infographic and less like a video thumbnail, if you have less than two it’s like “what is the point?”
- There tends to be a main focus in the image, with some background noise but not too much. This is average for a lot of art being the whole foreground, midground, and background standard. I think it’s specific to YouTube however as, in a sea of thumbnails, it’s important to stand out. I know from personal experience, many people just slab a screenshot on it and call it a day.

Also, some may ask why I did two of the same and not just one. Well, those who know a bit on analytics and how users interact with content whether online or offline, you’d know about something called the A/B test. This test is meant to quantify the effectiveness of certain aspects of a given thing, in this case a YouTube video and specifically its thumbnail, via statistics. In Team Theorists case which, this is just me spitballing here idk the exact way they do it, Josiah, their analytics lead, tests the effectiveness of at least two thumbnails. If the videos don’t reach a certain number of views, likes, whatever given metric, they try with a different thumbnail. I suspect they do this with titles and tags as well. This is also why I think we occasionally see videos on the channels change thumbnails, even months or years after they’re post, change out. For instance, the bee movie meme film theory changed its thumbnail a while after it released and started popping off in new viewership, with comments like “bro why am I seeing this is the year of our lord ____” and the like."