Remember “Baby Shark Dance?” How about “Gangnam Style?” Those videos were among the most inescapable offerings of the YouTube canon, pumped into our lives by the last vestige of the internet monoculture: the Trending page. Now, a full decade since it was first introduced, YouTube announced it is ending its effort to inject top videos into everyone’s feeds, opting instead to highlight popular content in specific niches.
In a blog post, the company admits that the internet ecosystem has changed considerably since it first introduced the Trending page. “Back when we first launched the Trending page in 2015, the answer to ‘what’s trending?’ was a lot simpler to capture with a singular list of viral videos that everyone was talking about.” It said that fandoms and communities started developing on the platform, the idea of the universal “viral” video started to fade, and visits to the Trending page had decreased “significantly” over the last half-decade.
So, it’s going away. The four very broad categories of the original Trending page—Now, Music, Gaming and Movies— are going to get broken out into their own lists, which will include Trending Music Videos, Weekly Top Podcast Shows, and Trending Movie Trailers—with the existing Gaming Explore page set to replace the gaming category.
Beyond that, YouTube is going to lean harder into its personalized recommendations. The company says it’ll “keep showing viewers the videos that we think they’ll love” through its recommendation algorithm that should be pulling videos from viewer-specific niches rather than trying to identify universally popular videos. The “Explore” menu, where the Trending page currently resides, will remain and offer non-curated video offerings if you’d still like to tap into the broader zeitgeist.
The change is frankly a long time coming for YouTube, which has become the most popular streaming video service around, with more video content being uploaded daily than a person could watch in an entire lifetime. Videos now regularly rack up millions of views without ever cracking mainstream attention, simply thriving in a niche category. Unfortunately for YouTube, one of those niche categories is now AI slop—an invention that its parent company, Google, is actively participating in enabling. But earlier this month, YouTube announced that it’ll be tamping down on AI by making it more difficult to monetize content that isn’t “original” and “authentic.” So hopefully, if a video does manage to break containment and go mega-viral like the days of old, it won’t be some AI monstrosity that managed to machine-learn its way to fame.
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