Dan Lambert

This @MarkRober thumbnail caught my eye, so I thought it would be interesting to break down WHY this thumbnail is GENIUS! 🧠 There’s lots of interesting techniques & details that you might not realise at first glance, but put together, this thumbnail makes you CLICK! THREAD 👇

Looking for thumbnail designers who have similar styles to these examples👇 Please DM me with your rates and portfolio. Paid opp 💸

In 2022, Jesser handed me the keys, and together we built Jesser Reacts and later Team Jesser into one of the most successful reacts and group channels on YouTube. Today, this chapter of my life comes to an end as I’ve decided to leave Jesser. When I joined, we were a scrappy team of five. I'm now stepping away from a sports media company that supports 50+ employees and entertains millions of fans every single day. I'm eternally grateful that I had the opportunity to move across the world to Los Angeles and live out my childhood dreams, all because @Jesser took a chance on me. So what’s next? I’ll continue building with amazing creators, sharing over a decade of knowledge and experience with them. The only difference is that now I’ll be spending my time with several creators instead of one. I’m excited to start the next chapter!

The ‘weird kids’ who were talking to their cameras in their bedrooms, who were editing late at night, who were obsessed with YouTube, are now directing blockbuster movies. And the ‘weird’ kids who grew up watching YouTubers, are now adults who spend their money supporting internet culture and creators. Love how far this industry has come. From creators being belittling and ridiculed at every step, to now crushing it at the box office 🔥

AI this, AI that…. Sometimes you still need to put your boss in a green screen suit and take some YouTube thumbnail pictures 😅 That’s not to say these thumbnails don’t use AI - in fact each one shown has elements of it. But great creative direction and practical thumbnail photoshoots still have their place on YouTube despite what some people want you to believe. And I'm not gonna lie, thumbnails have never been easier to make than now. So I'm not sure if anyones going to bother with photoshoots for much longer.

I’ve worked with some of the biggest creators in the world, contributing to over 2 BILLION long-form views on YouTube. Here are 5 TIPS I think EVERY creator team should be following 👇 1️⃣ SERIALIZE YOUR CONTENT 📹 You don’t need to reinvent the wheel every time you upload. Create repeatable formats and series you can rely on. Something that guarantees a predictable viewership minimum for your channel. Most successful channels aren’t built on random ideas, they’re built on systems. 2️⃣ REPURPOSE YOUR CONTENT ♻️ Making new videos is HARD. But if you’re already sitting on hundreds of hours of content, it doesn’t take much time to convert it into different formats like: - Vertical clips - TikToks, YouTube Shorts, Reels - Compilations - stitching multiple of the same series into one ultra-longform video. The same content put in a different package can attract a whole new audience. Maximize the reach and revenue each piece of content brings you. 3️⃣ DOUBLE DOWN ON WHAT WORKS 📈 A lesson I learned from @PaddyG96 is to double down on videos that perform well. What does this mean in practice? - Say your videos average 200k views, and your latest upload hit 1m views. That’s called an outlier. - Follow up the 1m view outlier video as fast as possible. This might seem obvious, but most creators just go back to making the 200k view videos. This rule applies to your back catalogue too, check which videos have over performed. 4️⃣ FILE BACKUPS & ORGANIZATION 💾 TikTok and YouTube are NOT your personal backup drives. Posts get deleted, accounts get suspended. Get in the habit of backing up every single thing you do and being systematic in how you organize your projects. Start simple: - Set up Google accounts and a shared drive for your team to use on all projects. - Back up: Video footage, final video export files, thumbnail JPEG’s and PSD’s, creative and legal documents and anything else crucial to your business. And don’t rely just on cloud storage, have physical hard drives too. 5️⃣ SHARE YOUR LEARNINGS 💡 A lot of creator teams keep everything to themselves, and I get it. But when you don’t share, you also don’t learn. MrBeast has explained how he used to have mastermind groups with other creators, all focused on learning together. Because 5 creators will make 5X the mistakes and learn 5X as fast compared to doing it on your own. The best teams are out networking and building relationships, talking to their counterparts at other companies, sharing insights and learning. You’ll be surprised to find that you don’t have as much competition as you think, and how happy others are to help.

We’ve all seen those surveys, every kid wants to be a YouTuber, influencer or streamer. 😬 Unfortunately, I’d argue that most kids are thinking about it wrong. ❌ 👉 I think if you want to become a creator, you should work for one first. Take some of the most beloved actors and comedians we know today. Many started by interning and working behind the scenes at SNL and Late Night shows before having their big break. As the creator space becomes more and more competitive, many of next creator generation will take the same path. Learn first, and create later. Think of it like an apprenticeship. You get to learn the craft by working with an established creator business, all while being paid. But why work for someone else? 👇 - Because there is no school, degree or classes that you can take to learn how to make a YouTube video, or optimize your TikTok. And I don't think there can ever be a true education for any of this as it'd be outdated before you'd finish writing it. - When you’re part of a creative group who are all trying to solve the same problems, you’ll break and learn things fast. - You’ll get to have a front row seat to creative processes, key decisions being made, mistakes unraveling in real time. The good, the bad and the ugly. Many of the most talented minds behind the scenes have already found their own success as creators. But I think that as opportunities for creators to earn keep growing, we’ll see more behind the scenes folks find the confidence to leave their jobs and become creators themselves. What do you think? 🤔

Small to medium sized creators have been quietly winning on YouTube, let me explain why 👇 When I started working with Azzyland in 2018, there were 5 big reaction channels - Azzyland, Infinite (Caylus), Reaction Time, DangMattSmith and Sniperwolf. Each getting 100-200m monthly views - even more impressive when you consider this was all before language dubbing. 📈 The whole genre was dominated by a handful of channels. Fast forward to 2023 at Jesser Reacts, I noticed that whilst the total viewership in the genre kept growing steadily, we were struggling to break through our viewership baseline of 25-30m monthly views. We tried changing a lot of things but nothing seemed to help. So what changed between 2018 and 2023? 🤔 👉 More channels started publishing reaction videos, but crucially, each one was targeting specific audience interests.💡 We actually ended up being one of these channels: - Jesser Reacts was for sports and basketball fans 🏀 - Sypher Reacts was for gaming and Fortnite viewers 🕹️ - Ali-A captured a younger demographic 👶 - Then you had ‘professional reacts’ - doctor reacts, lawyer reacts, pilot reacts and so on. There was now something for everyone, and viewers didn't have to stick to 'generic' reaction video topics, so they voted with their click and screen time. What was once the big 5 reacts channels turned into 50+ English speaking channels, each aimed at a specific audience interest and community. Now imagine this happening across every content genre - because that's where we're at. As YouTube has gotten better at serving content to viewers, our video feeds have become increasingly personalized. Thats why there's not many 'big' creators we all watch and talk about anymore - we just all have different interests and YouTube knows that. People love to complain about YouTube, sometimes deservedly, sometimes not so much. But I don't think many of us can deny that it's by far the best platform for video content and monetization. Each year the platform pays out more money to creators, helping support millions of jobs around the world (myself and probably you reading included 😉). I'm curious if anyone else has noticed this?

4 years ago a creator I didn't know, called @Jesser , sent me a DM wanting to have a consultation. What was supposed to be just a short stint helping re-launch an old channel, led to me moving to California. From JSR to Jesser Reacts to Team Jesser. This channel has changed a lot! In 4 years, with the help of so many amazing people, we’ve achieved: - 1,011,028,847 long form views - 209,177,289 watch time hours or 23,878 years!!! - 3,263,752 new subscribers - 579 videos published Not bad for a ’second’ channel 😉 What started out as a small team with @Jesser, @jasonrussak, @rizzledigz, @JohnnyCarmack_, @travis_fukumoto has since turned into one of the hottest sports media brands in the world! Sometimes an unexpected message can really change everything. Because when people ask me what I do, I always say that I don’t have a job, I just get paid to do my hobby.

2025 started with us sunsetting Jesser Reacts and rebranding to Team Jesser. From reaction content to in real life From 45min shoots to 4 hours From a remote team to all in office We made major changes, yet despite the challenges, the channel had a record year across views, watch time & revenue! 🥳 📊 In 2025, we achieved: - 70 unique videos published - 278M long form views (160 million from catalog, 118 million views from 2025 videos) - 1.5M average views per video - 920,000 subscribers gained I hope 2026 is an exciting year for everyone! 🎉

If you’re not using the 67 meme in your YouTube thumbnails, you’re missing out on SERIOUS views! 📈 🤔 We noticed that viewers have become bored and numb of the usual $100 / 1,000,000 numbers so we thought we’d try implementing something new - 67! 💡 Too many creators obsess over the first 24 hour performance, but forget that YouTube is a long game. Even a slight bump in your CTR, retention and packaging can compound in a big way over the months and years which your video will be on YouTube for. 📊 Imagine this level of optimization at scale! We’re always refining, always testing and always pushing to improve our video and catalogue performance. Anyways, I just made this all up. It might be true, it might be false, our data has not shown any solid evidence to back this up. Point is, experiment with your thumbnails and don’t believe everything you see on here 😅

Since rebranding Jesser Reacts to Team Jesser, 33 out of 51 published videos have hit 1 million views! The awesome thing about YouTube, is that this number will only keep rising over time. 📈 💡 What I’ve learned is that you can’t judge video performance in the first 24 hours or first month. Come back to it a year later and you’ll be surprised how well ‘dead’ videos can perform when given time to find their audience. 📊 The problem is that too many creators focus on trend-hopping and don't stop to think where they’ll be a few months from now, let alone years. Build an evergreen content library and it will drive your business for years! Plan for the future!

The magic behind 1/10 thumbnails 🪄

4 Million Subscribers! 🥳 It's amazing to see how much the channel has evolved, from being a second channel to becoming it's own true power house as Jesser Reacts and now Team @Jesser We're just getting better and better at what we do each and every day, so it won't be long until we get our hands on a diamond play button.

We recently hit the first 20 Million View video across @Jesser channel's! 🥳 This is the 7th Most Watched Basketball Video on YouTube! (Long-form) 📈 ZERO multi-language dubbed views! (yet) We had no idea when we started posting compilations that they would be this successful

Thought it would be interesting to share a retention graph for a 10 HOUR compilation video on Jesser Reacts We’ve done over 20 one hour compilations, so this was an experiment we really had no expectations for. The video started slow but is now getting good views each day!

We just hit 3M Subscribers on @Jesser Reacts! 🎉

We recently hit 1 Billion lifetime views on @Jesser Reacts! 📈 739 Million views since the relaunch of the channel in 2022 - of which 150 million are from Shorts! The second billion should come around much faster 🙏

Crazy that making 8 minute videos on YouTube in 2024 is like playing on hard mode. Wasn’t long ago that everyone was making 10:01 and later 8:01 videos