There’s a very important piece of real-estate devoted to something called “Trending” both on YouTube’s mobile and desktop experiences. It takes you to a land of viral videos, Jimmy Kimmel clips, top 40 music, and movie trailers. And yes, also some videos from a smattering of medium and large native YouTubers. The trending tab is extremely important, but not for the reasons you think.
Let’s be honest with ourselves, YouTubers click on the trending tab for one single reason…to analyze what is on the trending tab and then complain that it isn’t what we think it should be. “It isn’t showing the most popular content on the platform,” we say. “It’s hiding the biggest content on the site!”
OK, let’s take our outraged creator hats off for a second and just think about this like creators.
One thing we know better than anyone: Whenever you make anything, you have to understand your audience. But when we criticize the trending tab, we are misunderstanding its audience. It is not for us.
The complexity and nuance of YouTube’s culture, creators, drama, genres, styles, and memes is what makes it wonderful for people on the inside, but it is also a wall that keeps people on the outside.
Some people want to build that wall higher. They don’t want the platform to grow and change by adding new folks who are less aware of the culture. But, unless we all want to divide up the existing pie into smaller and smaller pieces (and also prevent new creators from getting and serving new audiences) creators should not be those people.
Who is Trending For, Then?
Trending is for people who either do not yet have a deep relationship with YouTube and its culture, or who are simply less comfortable with a deep relationship with YouTube as a platform and a community. Those people feel more connected to a broader cultural experience, and that is the experience that Trending serves.
Every bit of the YouTube platform is about a personalized, YouTube-specific perspective except trending. It is the one place on the site that is about what’s happening outside of the culture of the platform. And so, yeah, it’s full of movie trailers and talk show Jimmys and Ariana Grande.
For people not as connected to different forms of creation, it is an entrance point…the place where YouTube can show that it isn’t just an insular culture that is only welcoming to people who have spent half a decade establishing their favs. But, of course, YouTube also includes some medium and large creators in trending to establish the reality (and it is a reality, it just isn’t known by everyone yet) that YouTubers are just as mainstream as Jimmys.
Trending Matters, But Not for the Reason You Think
Getting on trending matters, it drives traffic, but not as much as you think. I’ve been on every part of the trending page, and unless you’re in the top three, it doesn’t drive significant traffic compared with homepage or sidebar placement. It is far more useful as a door into the culture and connection of YouTube. To us, who have been using the platform for, in many cases, more than a decade, it’s a little shocking that anyone would need this lower barrier, but they do. Those people are out there, and if YouTube doesn’t make a place that is at least a little comfortable for them, they won’t use the platform.
Hosting and surfacing legacy media content isn’t all about YouTube trying to abandon its core, it’s about inviting a broader variety of viewers to the platform.
There are reasons to be frustrated with YouTube. Their algorithms still suck at figuring out what content is safe for advertisers. They’ve consolidated an unsustainable amount of power in one place. Their relationship with Google constantly forces to use the cultural clout of YouTube to try and force new, sub-par products (YouTube Music, Google+, half-baked original programming, etc) down our throats.
But the Trending Tab is good. It works for us. It works for YouTube. It is a genius strategy to convert mainstream media viewers into YouTube viewers and complaining about it weakens our complaints about the many legitimate problems the platform has.
Hank Green is the CEO of Complexly and DFTBA.com. He and his brother started VidCon, the world’s large celebration of online video.
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Steemit is about curating content. The content on the trending page has already been curated; so I never visit it. I go to the created page instead.
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