<aside> <img src="/icons/thumbs-up_red.svg" alt="/icons/thumbs-up_red.svg" width="40px" /> Welcome To Video Thumbnails

In this video, we’re going to cover YouTube Thumbnails—we’ll discuss why you need them for ads, how to create them for your ads, how to hire thumbnail designers and templates you can use to make the process easier. Let’s get into it.

</aside>

Resources 📕

• Thumbnail Swipe File

Thumbnails Explained 💬

In 2021, Google made a big change to YouTube ads and made them “responsive” — which means that one ad will now show up on two different placements**:**

1. In-Feed Ads
2. In-Stream Ads

So now, your YouTube ads will show up like this:

Let’s go into each one and explain how it works.

In-Stream Ads 🌊

In-Stream ads are the video ads that play before, during or after YouTube videos that you watch.

In general, these ads have a skip button that appear after 5 seconds of the ad playing, giving you 5 seconds to hook the user’s attention before the user has the option to skip.

The thumbnail you add to your video won’t be used for In-Stream Ads, because the video shows up before, during or after another video—meaning there’s no thumbnail to click.

In-Feed Ads 🔎

In-Feed ****Ads are ads that show up on the YouTube homepage, the YouTube search results, and the YouTube watch next prompts. You can see how these placements look here.

In-Feed Ads show up with a headline, thumbnail and description. This means that you need a strong thumbnail to increase your click-through rate on discovery ads.