Was Henry Ford the Best Thumbnail Designer?
Well was he? But he couldn’t be right? The platform didn’t even exist back then. Thumbnails didn’t exist. There were no YouTube channels. There was no YouTube studio to measure their CTR. There was no subscriber count, no view counts, no likes, dislikes or comments. But maybe there was and we’re just thinking about our channels all wrong. I mean, they might not have had YouTube channels back then, but they certainly had businesses. They might not have had CTR, but they certainly had conversion rates. They might not have had subscriber counts, but they certainly had customers, they could measure purchases, they could get public positive and negative feedback. And that’s all YouTube is. A modern day, hyper-advanced online version of these games of synthesis and entrepreneurship that have existed since the start of civilisation. And if that’s the case then we could be gaining access to literally thousands of years of information on how to market our content to get more views. As a thumbnail designer myself I’ve spend an outrageous amount of time trying to learn how I can make the best thumbnails and most of that learning has come directly from modern platforms like Twitter or YouTube. But as I started to read more books, Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, Dale Carnegie or Napoleon Hill it began to dawn upon me just how similar a lot of the principals of business and life in general are from all those years ago. And with that new knowledge in mind I of course set out to see if, paradoxically, I could learn how to make better thumbnails from a time when they didn’t even exist. And that’s when I found it. A little book by one of the fathers of modern advertising in Ford’s time. The man responsible for the reason you brushed your teeth this morning. They man who introduced the concept of the slogan in advertising. The man paid over $5,000,000 a year in today’s money to apply his principles of advertising to explode companies and their growth. Enter Claude C. Hopkins.