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
When it removes the entirety of LTT from YouTube it will worth a try. There isn’t much in this world that makes me seethe but that plonker is one.
I kinda like LTT materials, especially with Anthony but this extension is a godsend as I always hated their crappy thumbnails and titles.
It’s Emily now if you did not know.
Thanks for the clarification. I wasn’t aware of that.
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.
I get that people can find him annoying, but that plonker’s video on dashcams actually helped me make a properly informed choice that literally saved me hundreds of dollars AND ensured I got something that actually had higher fidelity recording than many devices multiple times its price.
I’m glad he saved you money. I just wish he’d learn the basic grammar of production.
He’s not the only bad YouTuber. 99.9% of them are clueless. Take the ubiquitous jump cut edit. They are everywhere. This is fine if you’re a nouvelle vague French film director in the 1950s and 60s but have no place in a YT vid. It’s unprofessional. None of these people seem to be able to get through a paragraph of text without fluffing their lines and consequently having to jump cut over the mistake. Watch an Andy Edwards music analysis vid and you’ll see he can get through 45 minutes without a single edit. He knows his subject well and therefore is less prone to errors. If he does screw up he’s smart enough to explain it and just let things flow without interruption.
What’s with editing every breath and pause between sentences? Anyone that tried to talk like than in real life would die of oxygen deprivation before the end of their vid. It’s unnatural and destroys the flow.
Then there’s the unnecessary use of effects. It reminds me of the early days of desktop publishing when everyone and his dog suddenly became typographers. The horror, the horror. Just because they have 49 installed typefaces doesn’t mean they have to use all of them in their poxy one page newsletters but that didn’t stop them.
The basic principles of film and TV production were established over a century ago. If some spotty oik with a computer and a cam in his bedroom at his parents’ house thinks they can do better then bring it on. I have yet to see any evidence of this happening. Putting some Star Wars toys on a shelving unit in the background and draping some LEDS over it is not visual innovation.
Let me summarise: Know your subject. Write a decent script. Learn it. Rehearse until you are perfect. Don’t use SUPERFLUOUS capitalisation in the TITLES of your latest MASTERPIECE.
I’ve been in the business too long and amateurs irritate the f**k out of me. There’s a lot more I could mention but life’s too short.
Ok. grumpy old man rant over :)
This isn’t tv or a movie, you have a lot more competition on youtube. People will not leave a theatre, and tv is most of the time just background noise. But people will click out of a video fast. On youtube, everytimes you leave a two seconds blank, you loose a significant part of your audience. And with LTT posting 5 videos a day, of course they can’t learn everything to make perfect shots when they can just cut it and appear more dynamic.
LTT is a company with more than 100 employees, they have professionnal who spend their life in analytics to make the best performing videos. That means epileptic editing with cut and effect every few seconds. And shitty thumbnail and title which I will gladly replace with this extension from now on.
@Spudger @foss I would even argue that you don’t even have to be good at reading your script. Just get rid of all the jump cuts and videos would become much more bearable
Yup. I used to enjoy Niccolove’s work when he was a naive noob with no idea about production. Now he’s just another unwatchable YouTuber drowning in effects and gimmicky editing. The first rule of communication is communicate first. Everything else is Garni du Jour (© Frank Zappa):
The way in which the material is presented is equally important as what’s on the record. It’s the GARNI DU JOUR way of life. You go buy a hamburger. If somebody gives you a hamburger on a dish, it means one thing. If somebody gives you a hamburger on a dish with a piece of green stuff and a wrinkled carrot and a radish – even though you don’t eat that stuff – it’s a Deluxe Hamburger. It’s the same piece of dog meat on the inside, but one’s got the GARNI DU JOUR. American have become accustomed to having a GARNI DU JOUR on everything