You can pour ₹15 lakh into a video and set it on fire

You can pour ₹15 lakh into a video. If the title and thumbnail don't earn the click, you just set ₹15 lakh on fire.

Our biggest video yet this year did 7.5 lakh views. Good script, clean edit, but none of that is why it worked. It worked because people clicked — and the only thing that decides a click is the title and the thumbnail. That's the packaging, and it carried the whole video.

Both halves of it used to be a bottleneck. You needed a designer who knew the software for the thumbnail, and hours of rewriting to land the title. AI erased that. I can generate the gravestone scene in thirty seconds and draft fifty titles in a minute — the making is free now.

Which means the making was never the hard part. The hard part is knowing which version is right, and that's what AI can't touch. Take the title. I had a few I believed in, so I put three head to head:

"India's IT Dream Is Falling Apart" → 32.1%
"Why India's IT Dream Is Falling Apart" → 28.8%
"The Indian IT Dream is Dead" → 39.2%, winner

The winning title won on one thing: finality. "Dead," where the others said "falling apart." That small shift, from a slow decline to a flat-out death, was a seven-point swing in watch time share — on YouTube, the difference between a video that travels and one that just disappears.

The thumbnail was the same kind of call, made a dozen times over. The gravestone, the marigold garland, the little tricolour, each one chosen to make an Indian story land for a stranger who's never heard the word Infosys. AI could have rendered any of it in seconds. It could never have told me which version to bet on. That's the taste, and taste is the rarest thing in the room now that everything else is free.

So I make my own packaging now. I'm no designer, but once you have the eye, AI is just the hands. I still bring in designers I love on some projects, and I'd happily do it again tomorrow. They were never the bottleneck. And here's what surprises people: I'm slower than ever. I'll sit with a title and a thumbnail longer than some people spend on the entire edit.

Because that's the most exciting thing I know in this work. Months of effort, lakhs spent, and whether any of it gets seen comes down to a title and an image you can change in an afternoon. Get them right, and a video that would have died at a few hundred views reaches seven and a half lakh people. I don't know a bigger lever anywhere.

If you work in content, you gotta start designing.