Youtube doesn’t really just broadly explain how to get on its Trending tab, which is partly the reasoning behind why we don’t worry about it too much. Although this is something we NEED to know more about if we want to understand the basis of Youtube’s current status in the world of streaming and how it has been so dominant over the years.
This video gives a very good interpretation of how YouTube Trending actually works by:
-Conducting an experiment on YouTube Trending
What else can we do but congratulate YouTube? They’ve embraced the idea of starting from the bottom and rising to the top economically which is none other than impressive, but the real question becomes how have they been able to keep themselves in the picture year after year? How are they still extremely in relevancy at this point in time after starting in around 2005?
-Nicholas Thompson provides a very interesting illustration on the “secret” behind how Youtube has been able to keep it’s relevancy over what will soon be two decades:
“YouTube has a hundred engineers who are trying to get the perfect next video to play automatically. And their techniques are only going to get more and more perfect over time, and we will have to resist the perfect. There’s a whole system that’s much more powerful than us, and it’s only going to get stronger. The first step is just understanding that you don’t really get to choose how you react to things.”
Nicholas basically interprets that Youtube’s mainstreaming system is strictly controlled by it’s engineers, who are responsible for what the user sees such as advertisements, the best possible streaming settings, what’s trending and what our subscriptions have uploaded. This is a pretty advanced sort of technique to get viewers to continuously keep clicking on videos, but the general goal for them is to lure you into clicking on them.
“95 percent of news that appears on Trending is from traditional media. Creators like Philip DeFranco, who was awarded funding by Google as part of an initiative to create better news channels on YouTube, have to hit a far higher view threshold to appear on Trending.”
“Using data scrapped from 40,000 videos, the study found that creators, like Logan Paul, need to reach about 11 million views on a video before it hits the Trending section. Comparatively, segments from TV shows like The Tonight Show only need a couple hundred thousand views.”
Who wouldn’t want to click to the latest news from today or yesterday that has generated mass conversation? The real issue is the fact that YouTube has created a pretty biased system that basically breeds TV media more likely to be trending rather than actual YouTuber content. In order for YouTubers to even reach the Trending feed, they have to reach a relatively large amount of views as soon as possible, while broadcasted media doesn’t need as much. This keeps viewers clicking on the videos on broadcasting media rather than what they really came for, to watch their favorite Youtuber.
Thompson, Nicholas. “Social Media Has Hijacked Our Minds. Click Here to Fight It.” Wired, Conde Nast, 8 Nov. 2017, https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-our-phones-tristan-harris-wants-to-rescue-them/.
Alexander, Julia. “YouTube’s Trending Section Puts Creators at a Huge Disadvantage over Big Brands.” The Verge, The Verge, 29 May 2019, https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/29/18642833/youtube-trending-coffee-break-pewdiepie-late-night-sports-highlights.
Over the years, YouTube continues to grow as a platform for entertainment and business, not to mention the fact that they’ve become extremely profitable in the process.
Below is a graph from BusinessofApps.com, a website that tracks the revenue and usage of companies such as YouTube.You can see the increase from 2001, where YouTube starts from about 0.07 billion dollars in US revenue only to rise up to 22.9 billion in less than a decade. We then notice the major increase into the year before what would be a second decade in 2018, where YouTube is making about 116 billion dollars in US revenue.
For more information behind the background of what how YouTube has done annually that cannot be shown on this graph, check out the article on it:
Have a look at Youtube’s trending section right now!
https://www.youtube.com/feed/trending
Key Points from the Video:
-“World’s largest video sharing social network, the second largest search engine, and one of the top three websites worldwide”
-“Viewers watch hundred of millions of hours of video on YouTube every day.”
-“For marketing teams, video teasers about upcoming product releases can generate excitement and encourage conversations.”
Overall Picture: YouTube is one of the largest, actually top three websites in the world for video sharing and social networking to it’s viewers that donate hundred of millions of hourly attention to their channels. It has grown as a platform for businesses to sprout excitement around their products, and is easily programmed to grasp the interests of it’s viewers.
Our aspect will focus on one of the most live-streamed and accessed platform for social media…
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