I ran a thumbnail test on one of my videos. Two versions. Same words on both. The only change was the picture behind the text. One took 74.9%. The other took 25.1%. Nearly three to one. And I would have picked the wrong one. One thing to know about that number: YouTube scores watch time share, not clicks. So the winner isn't just the one more people clicked. It's the one that brought in people who stayed. This is free and it's already in your Studio. Content → your video → Thumbnail → Test & compare. You upload two, YouTube splits the traffic between them, and it tells you which one won. No tools. No cost. No guessing. Two days of doing nothing told me something I could have got wrong on my own. Got a thumbnail you're unsure about? Bring it to Idea Hour — Tuesdays and I'll go through it with you one to one.

Hey guys, just curious if anyone uses any keyword research tools that have an API so we can hook it up to Claude Code? Just curious because I do traditional SEO using Ahrefs, and being able to tap into the API has been a gamechanger, but I couldn't find anything for YouTube besides some on Apify 🤷‍♀️

This one's about AI design animation. My channel is about Raspberry Pi. 7,529 views since May. Here's where they came from. YouTube search: 45.6%. External: 40.4% and 83% of that is Google. So about a third of the total came from Google, not YouTube. Browse features, the home page, the algorithm deciding to push you gave 5.7%. What this teaches ? A video named after what people type works on multiple search engines, not just one. You may never have opened the External report and might be unaware that Google and other platforms are sending you anything at all. And you don't need the algorithm to pick you. It barely touched this one. I've pulled this video and four others apart properly in Ranked: Teardowns free, in the classroom. If you are running a Channel go check your own External number: Studio → Analytics → Reach → Traffic sources. What did you get?

The thing slowing me down was not ideas. It was editing. Through 2024, I was making videos in the microcomputer niche and doing every edit myself. The way I record, the audio and the video are separate files so every single video started with manually syncing everything before I could even begin cutting. I'd sit down to make something and lose the whole evening to that part. At some point I stopped and asked what the actual bottleneck was. It wasn't scripting. It wasn't finding topics. It was the one job I liked least. So I found an editor. Aside from getting more time back , he was better at it than I was, and he actually enjoys it. 2024: 6 long-form videos. 2025: 34. 2025 was also the year the channel got monetized. The clearest framing I've come across for this is Dan Martell's, in Buy Back Your Time , there's an opportunity cost to doing the work that drains you, and it's usually bigger than the cost of handing it off. His loop is four steps, and it's worth running on your own setup: 1. Audit your time. One week is enough. Write down where it actually goes, not where you think it goes. The gap is the whole point. 2. Find the task you dislike that eats the most hours. For me that was editing. It's usually obvious the moment it's written down. 3. Transfer it to someone better who enjoys it. That second half matters more than people expect you're not offloading a chore, you're giving it to someone who'd rather be doing it. 4. Fill the time with the work only you can do. For me that's ideas and scripting, because that's what decides whether a video is worth making at all. What's yours? Drop it in the comments. And if it turns out to be a "what do I make next" problem, that's the whole of Tuesday's Idea Hour bring one idea and we run it through the system live.

Here's something that happens a lot. You get an idea. You film it. You edit it. You upload it. And then almost nobody watches. The video wasn't bad. Nobody was looking for it. There's a way to find that out before you make it, and it takes about ten minutes. You type your idea into YouTube. You read the top five videos properly. You ask three things: is anyone smaller than me up there, are these results old or badly named, and do they actually answer the question? Then you decide. Make it, or skip it. Skipping is a win too. You just saved yourself a weekend. So let's do it seven times. One idea a day, for seven days. Ten minutes each. You post what you found in the thread, and I'll try to share some solid insights By Sunday you'll have seven ideas you actually checked, at least one worth filming, and a title written for it. That's your next month of videos decided by what people are searching for not by what felt like a good idea on a Tuesday. Never done this before? Good. Lesson 2 in Start Here shows you how, with two examples. It takes ten minutes to read. Want in? Comment 𝗜'𝗠 𝗜𝗡 below and I'll DM you the daily format right away.