Three thumbnails
Three genuinely different concepts take about twenty extra minutes, and the third is often the one you would never have made otherwise.
You made one thumbnail. You looked at it, decided it was fine, and uploaded it. That is not a choice, because a choice needs at least two things in it, and you had one.
This is almost never laziness. The first idea arrives, it is workable, and stopping there feels like efficiency. It is efficient. It is also why your thumbnails all look like each other: you have been publishing your first idea for two years, and first ideas come from the same place every time.
Why is one thumbnail not a decision?
Because you have nothing to compare it against, including your own taste.
An image on its own can only be judged good or bad, which is a judgement you are badly placed to make about your own work. Two images can be compared, which is an easier operation entirely. You need to know whether this one is better than that one, and that question has an answer even when the other does not.
There is a second thing, and it is the one that pays. Making a second concept forces you to articulate what the first one was doing. You cannot make a genuinely different version without noticing what the original chose, and most people have never noticed, because they never had to say it out loud.
What makes three concepts different from three versions?
Three versions of one idea teach you nothing. This is where it usually fails.
If all three images are the same photograph with different text, or the same layout in three colours, you have made one concept and a colour picker. Whatever happens next is a small difference between near-identical things, which is indistinguishable from noise.
A concept is different when the thing in the frame is different. Vary the type of image, the dominant colour and what is shown. Three starting points, and they work for almost any subject.
The person
You, doing or reacting to the thing. A face gives a viewer somebody to be, and carries emotion an object cannot. It works when the video is about an experience: the difficulty of a technique, the surprise of a result, the relief when something finally behaves.
The subject on its own
No person at all. The instrument, the dish, the tool, the finished piece, shot cleanly with room around it. Often the strongest concept when the subject is interesting to look at and your face is adding no information. It also survives shrinking better, because there is less in it.
The thing laid out
Everything involved, arranged and shown at once. All the ingredients. Every part before assembly. The before and after in one frame. This one promises completeness, which attracts somebody deciding whether your video is thorough rather than whether it is enjoyable.
Three images built from those ideas differ in what they show, what they promise and who they are aimed at. That is what a test needs and what three colour variants can never provide.
Will the platform's test tools tell you which one won?
Probably not, and it is worth being honest about why.
The platform can rotate several thumbnails on the same video and report which performed best. That tool works, and it works properly on channels with a lot of traffic, because it needs a reasonable volume of impressions before the difference between two images separates from the difference between a Tuesday and a Thursday.
At the volume most people reading this are working at, that separation takes a long time to arrive, and what you get meanwhile is a preference dressed as a finding. If you have a large steady audience, use the tool and trust it. Otherwise use it anyway, because it costs nothing, and treat the result as a hint.
So why bother making three?
Because the value is in the making, not in the measuring.
Your first idea is your habit. Your second is a reaction against the first, which makes it more considered but still defined by it. Your third arrives after you have exhausted the obvious, and it is the one that surprises you. Ask anybody who designs for a living which of their first three ideas got used and the answer is rarely the first.
That is a design argument, not a statistical one. You are not running an experiment, you are refusing to publish your reflex, and the comparison improves the image before anything is measured.
This studio makes three thumbnail concepts for every video, each with its own title, as standard practice rather than as a test, for exactly that reason. The third concept is not there to win a contest. It is there because it would not otherwise exist.
When should you make them?
In one sitting, while the video is fresh, before you decide what it is about.
If you write the title first and then make thumbnails, all three will illustrate the title. Make the images first and two of them will suggest titles you would not have written, one of which is usually better than the title you had.
Twenty minutes, three concepts, no refinement until you have picked. Refining the first one is how you end up with one again.
What happens to the two you do not use?
They go in a folder, and the folder becomes the most useful thing you own after about a year.
An unused thumbnail is a complete idea for a video you have not made yet. The laid-out concept you rejected is a video about everything you need before you start. The face you did not use is a video about the part that goes wrong. Nothing is wasted.
The decision in front of you is a scheduling one, not an aesthetic one. Not whether three beats one, which you already accept. Whether twenty minutes goes into the calendar at the same point in every upload, or stays a thing you do when there is time, which means never.
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