Times change: The trending page disappears from YouTube
YouTube is discontinuing its Trending page and wants to make charts and recommendations more popular. This indicates that user needs have changed so much that Trending has become less important, and that the way people discover new videos is simply different than it used to be.
Trending disappears
When it launched this page in 2015, the world looked different. People wanted to quickly see which viral videos were getting a lot of views, because everyone was talking about them, but that’s different now. “Today, trends consist of many videos created by many fandoms, and there are more microtrends than ever before that diverse communities enjoy. Viewers are increasingly learning about trends in various places on YouTube , from recommendations and search suggestions to Shorts, comments, and communities.”
Ultimately, it’s a matter of data: far fewer people visited the Trending page, especially in the past five years. This is why the Trending menus are being phased out. Charts are more appropriate, according to the video platform. Here, you’ll find new videos in all sorts of categories, including Trending music videos, top podcasts, and trending movie trailers. More categories are being added all the time, YouTube says. This allows the platform to showcase a wider range of popular content and is more natural and aligns with how people find new videos today.
Youtube would rather inspire
Creators also have something new, namely an inspiration tab and hype, with which young creators can get a boost to help them discover. The latter costs money. It is interesting to see that YouTube has seen these changes with the trending menus for five years, because that is exactly the period in which Tiktok became a world hit. It is clear that that app turns out to be much more than a place for young girls to show dances.
Tiktok has had a huge influence on the social media and video landscape. Instagram came through Tiktok with Reels, YouTube with shorts, and there was a whole shift of long videos that you look horizontally at vertical snack videos. That also entails problems, namely that it is difficult to stop watching, but at the same time many people also get everything out of it: support, new friends and some even money. And it has also ensured that people started looking differently. Not only for trending videos, but we also see that less search is being made on Google and people simply type their search in Tiktok. Moreover, people find the trendng videos themselves, or the algorithm serves them automatically, so that that page is no longer so popular on YouTube, that’s not so bad.