BREAKING: The Rules of YouTube Just Changed Forever

The rules of YouTube just changed forever. One of 10, the world's largest

forever. One of 10, the world's largest YouTube strategy company, just released the biggest study ever done on what's working on YouTube right now in 2026.

They analyzed over 10,000 viral videos and looked at what they all had in common. But the results go against what

common. But the results go against what 99% of small channels are doing right now. So, in the next 15 minutes, I'm

now. So, in the next 15 minutes, I'm going to break down this entire study so that you can see exactly what is working right now to help you grow your channel.

And I can guarantee you haven't heard this stuff before because, well, I had it. So, let's go ahead and dive into the

it. So, let's go ahead and dive into the study. I'm going to skip through all the

study. I'm going to skip through all the BS and just show you what actually matters. The first is video duration,

matters. The first is video duration, and that tells you how long should your video actually be. So, they looked at tens of thousands of videos and found that videos that are 170 minutes on average get the most amount of views.

Now, as you can see here, the graph, as the videos go longer and longer, they typically get higher and higher views until they become around 210 minutes, and then after that, they drop off. So,

if you want to get more views, the clear answer here is make longer videos. Well,

let's say you don't want to create hour-long videos. Well, between 2 and 30

hour-long videos. Well, between 2 and 30 minutes, the ideal time is typically anywhere from 14 minutes all the way up to 28 minutes, with around 18 to 24 being the absolute highest. So, if

you're currently making 10-minute videos, it might be worth experimenting with some longer ones. And as you can see here, there's actually a lot more videos that are created around the 4 to 12 minute mark. But on average, the

longer content consistently gets more views. But this really depends on your

views. But this really depends on your niche. If you're in gaming,

niche. If you're in gaming, entertainment, food, or health and fitness, then 18 to 24 minutes stays true. However, if you're in the makeup

true. However, if you're in the makeup space or the finance space or the business space, you should either go super short or super long. But what

about titling? How long should you actually make your video's title? Well,

they actually found out that shorter titles perform better on average.

Typically, with around five, six, or seven words in the actual title itself.

And this makes sense because if you have more words than that, it's very likely that you're going to go over 60 characters and YouTube will cut off your title, meaning that people can't read the full thing. But what really surprised me is that titles with 30 or

fewer characters receive more than 60% more views than others. But then they studied something really, really interesting, which is actually title reading ease. And they calculate this

reading ease. And they calculate this using what's called the flesh reading score. So this is basically a formula

score. So this is basically a formula that you can apply to your titles and you can see how easy it is to read your content. So, a lot of people will say,

content. So, a lot of people will say, "Talk to your audience on a fifth grade level or a third grade level or talk to your audience like you're talking to a 9-year-old, right? So, it's easy for

9-year-old, right? So, it's easy for them to understand." This comes down to the actual wording that you use and if the words are easy to understand. So, a

really good way to test this for your own channel is just look up on the internet flesh reading ecore and then drop your title inside of it and see if you can score above a 100 because they found that 100 plus readability scores

get 20% more views than the average video, which is a big increase. Here are

some examples of that. Feel free to pause to read. But does adding numbers to your YouTube titles actually increase your views? Well, around 35% of videos

your views? Well, around 35% of videos have numbers, but videos with numbers have 11% fewer views. Now, they can definitely still work really, really well, but no matter the format, titles without numbers always perform better,

but even if it's just a dollar amount or it's just numbers or it's a year, still it performs better without any numbers.

Next is the title sentiment. Do positive

or negative YouTube titles actually perform better? Well, they actually

perform better? Well, they actually found that only around 11% of the titles on YouTube are more negative, meaning that they say something is bad or they excite fear or anger. Any of those emotions typically will be negative or

like the stock market is about to crash.

Only 11% of titles are that. However, on

average, they got 22% more views than positive titles. And we've seen this

positive titles. And we've seen this across a lot of our clients as well, especially in the real estate niche.

Negative titles almost always work better. And by the way, if you want to

better. And by the way, if you want to become a client and have us blow up your business on YouTube, then go ahead and click the link down below. Now, negative

titles perform better for both educational and entertainment videos.

Here are some of the different niches and how they perform when they have positive versus negative titles. But

what about emotion? Because titles can have a ton of different emotions. They

can be happy titles, angry titles, sad titles. What actually performs best?

titles. What actually performs best?

Well, they found that joy, controversy, and anger all had the most views, which makes a lot of sense because those are some of the strongest emotions. I mean,

you think about the news, that's almost always controversy or anger or fear, right? And those are some of the top

right? And those are some of the top three. I mean, think about the news.

three. I mean, think about the news.

They've been learning how to capture attention for centuries, and most news articles are controversy, anger, or fear. But how do views differ between

fear. But how do views differ between entertainment and education videos?

Well, there's roughly an even split on YouTube of entertainment and educational content. However, if you're making

content. However, if you're making entertainment content, you're going to get 44% more median views than educational content. For example, if

educational content. For example, if you're teaching somebody how to build a website, that only really applies to someone who is looking to build a website. Whereas, if you're making a

website. Whereas, if you're making a video where you go and you travel around the world, that video applies to literally every single person who's interested in travel, which is a lot more than web design. Next, we're going to talk about thumbnails. And the first thing that we need to look at is the

thumbnail faces. Does adding faces to

thumbnail faces. Does adding faces to your thumbnails actually [music] improve performance? Well, overall, three4s of

performance? Well, overall, three4s of videos have faces, but face versus no face perform similarly. Although the

majority of videos have one face, having multiple faces in the same thumbnail actually performs the best. So, as you can see, no faces performs at 45,000 on average, whereas one face performs on

42,000 on average, where two, three, and four all perform above 50,000, which is very, very interesting because most people would think that just a [music] normal face thumbnail with one person in

the middle would perform the best. And

typically, as you grow your channel, it makes more and more sense to actually show your face because you have a backlog of subscribers that are on the channel and who know who you are. But in

the beginning, like how I did on Amplify Views, this channel right here, I have gone pretty much completely no face on the thumbnails themselves. Because

frankly, when I started this channel, no one knew who I was. So, it would make no sense to have my face on there because it doesn't add anything. No one's going to click on that for me. So, it makes sense for me to use that space in [music] order to actually put an

element, which is why no face thumbnails perform better on small and medium channels and actually channels at 100 to 200K as well. Now, if you're in the entertainment niche or the food space, then having a face works way better.

However, if you're in gaming or movies and TV shows, no face is by far better.

Also, finance, lifestyle, and makeup and beauty perform better with faces on them. But business, fitness, and movies

them. But business, fitness, and movies and TV shows do not. And you can also see on the lefth hand side all of the different niches, so you can look for your own and see which one performs better for you. But if we're just separating this as educational versus

entertainment, then in the education space, having a face actually works a little bit better. However, not having a face [music] in the entertainment space still works better. But what about having text on your thumbnails? Does

that actually help or hurt? Well, 84% of thumbnails have text [music] on them.

But thumbnails with text receive on average 19% fewer median views. So why

do people put text on their thumbnails if it performs or worse? Well, let's

find out. Because [music] having some text actually does help, but you have to do it in the right way. So, they have found that covering less than 6% of the thumbnail with text does best with

around 3 to 6% of the entire thumbnail covered performing by far the best if you are going to put text. But what

about the number of characters? Is there

a certain number of letters that you should have in the thumbnails to make them perform better? They found that four to nine characters in the thumbnail performs best. So, you shouldn't be

performs best. So, you shouldn't be writing out long words, which made sense because people aren't going to read like an entire paragraph on your thumbnail.

And even if you go to 15, 21 characters, it's a lot to read. people are just scrolling. They have about 0.02 seconds

scrolling. They have about 0.02 seconds to have your thumbnail catch their eye.

It's very difficult [music] to do that if you have a ton of text on there. So,

if you're going to put text on your thumbnail at all, then keep it low. But

they found that in both niches, in educational and entertainment, no text still performs better. But what about colors? Now, we talk a lot about color

colors? Now, we talk a lot about color theory on this channel, but what colors actually perform the best in [music] thumbnail? Well, they found that cion,

thumbnail? Well, they found that cion, green, and orange are the top three colors in your thumbnails. You can see that in these thumbnails here. They just

visually pop. Having the primary color be scan, green, or orange just makes it pop out against the YouTube homepage so much and really catches the eye. And

scion is the number one most engaging color. But what about the actual

color. But what about the actual brightness of your thumbnail? Well, they

found that brighter thumbnails typically have better performance. So, as you can see, the brighter the image goes, as long as it's not like super super overexposed, does the best. Here's two

examples of that. As you can see, this one is much darker. And then the one on the right is just super bright. Like,

it's very very bright. very saturated

and it catches the eye so much. So, that

is the entire study. Let me know what you think of it down below. I'll leave a link to it in the description as well so you can go check it out on your own.

This is a bit of a different video than I normally do, but I thought I'd drop it here. And if you want my free YouTube

here. And if you want my free YouTube course, go ahead and catch it here.

There's no catch. It's completely free and it'll tell you everything you need to know in order to get to 100,000 subscribers. Thanks and have a good one.

subscribers. Thanks and have a good one.