Been a long time since I wrote up the whole "Is clickbait bad" story, let's go again.
Should you clickbait? is a very general question. Let's first dissolve what "Clickbait" means.
Long story short, clickbait means something is designed to get people to want to see more about something after seeing a short impression of it.
Is clickbaiting bad? Hell no, everyone is doing it. It's more bad if you don't do it.
On YouTube you just get two impressions to videos:
- Title
- Thumbnail
- Description... ish
View attachment 20143
Those are the only things someone will see before having to decide whether to click on your video or the one below it first. Your video is one of 8 (in recommendations) or 5 (in search, assuming it's on top of the searched term) on a page. If you want your video to be the one being selected you have to stand out. That's not a bad thing. Think of it, if your title and stuff weren't designed to get people to your content, why even bother writing them?
But then why is clickbait portrayed so negatively?
Well there's the difference between "good" and "misleading" clickbait that I explain on a weekly basis. Misleading clickbait is just what you'd expect. You click on a video promising a
30000$ HOUSE AND CAR GIVEAWAY just to see a 15 year old play uncut clash of clans at 140p for half an hour. Sidenote, irrelevant titles and tags are
against YouTube's Guidelines as well. Most people confuse misleading clickbait with just creating actually good metadata. Keep stuff relevant to the content, you don't want to open a can labelled "caviar" just to see the can filled to the brim with
Spam.
Oh and don't stop making thumbnails, look at the screenshot above. They are the most important thing to stand out and make up a third of the search result and half of a recommendation.