YouTube is saying goodbye to the long-active hub that compiles popular content from across the platform. The Trending tab will be sunsetted in favor of category-specific charts that will offer more granular lists of top-performing videos.
The Trending tab evolved out of YouTube’s original homepage design, which highlighted notable videos that were rolling up big view counts. In those early days, trending content served as a unifying force for a creator community that was small enough to be understood as a single entity.
In recent years, however, the rapid expansion of YouTube’s creator community turned the single, centralized hub of trending content into an obsolete concept. That cultural shift informed YouTube’s decision to sunset the Trending tab.
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“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,” a YouTube rep said in an email. “But today, trends consist of many videos created by many fandoms, and there are more micro-trends enjoyed by diverse communities than ever before.” The new charts will “show a wider range of popular content that’s relevant.”
Breaking the Trending tab into multiple rankings will allow YouTube to address long-held gripes about the formula it uses to decide which videos qualify as trending content. The 2017 addition of an “on the rise” section let YouTube highlight some up-and-comers alongside videos with higher raw viewership. But over the next few years, many top creators argued that the Trending tab was still falling short of its goal to surface “hot” content, leading to further changes.
The lack of balance on the Trending tab was an annoyance for some creators, but more importantly, it sapped the page’s usefulness among its target demographic. “[The Trending tab] is far more useful as a door into the culture and connection of YouTube,” Hank Green wrote in 2020. “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.”
That reasoning explains why the Trending tab tended to offer more K-pop than creator content. But as marketers look to make their YouTube spend more targeted, those generalized portraits no longer suffice. Advertisers looking to partner with creators outside of commonly trending categories like sports, gaming, and music won’t find the channels they’re looking for on a central hub.
YouTube began phasing out the Trending tab by removing it on mobile devices in 2020. The arrival of Shorts filled in some of that space. Then, earlier this year, YouTube previewed its new crop of category-specific charts by debuting a new ranking dedicated to podcast content.
The full complement of the new trending content charts will roll out over the “next few weeks.” In the meantime, if you need to keep tabs on the hottest YouTube videos, you can check out our Tubefilter charts.
