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.
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