YouTube’s trending section was the place where people came to know what kind of content is being watched the most or is going viral at the moment. But after maintaining its place for more than a decade, this feature is now being discontinued. YouTube has decided that now it will give priority to category-specific popular videos by removing the ‘Trending’ and ‘Trending Now’ pages.
Launched in 2015, the trending page used to show a list that included all kinds of viral and top views videos. But as time changed, the interests of the audience diversified and the world of content became wider than ever. In view of this, YouTube has informed on its help page that now it is bringing a new system to show trending videos according to different categories.
Now users will be able to see the most popular content in different categories through YouTube charts. These include options like already existing trending music videos, weekly list of top podcasts and trending movie trailers. Also, YouTube is planning to add more categories to it in the future. For the rest of the content, users will see suggested videos according to them on the homepage.
YouTube spokesperson Meghan gave an interesting reason behind this decision. According to her, “Nowadays viewers find trending content on YouTube not just from the trending page, but quickly through many means like search, recommendations, shorts, community tab and comments. Due to this, the use of the trending page has decreased significantly in the last five years.”
End of an era (Youtube Trending Page)
With the closure of the trending page, a special era of YouTube is also coming to an end. When this feature was launched in 2015, it became the most preferred medium to find new viral videos. You could see videos there that were either making a splash in the world of music, or were exciting everyone as the much-awaited trailer of a film.
The trending list gave recognition to many big names on the platform. For example, it was here that hits like “Despacito” and “See You Again” first gained global popularity. It also gave creators of commentary and reaction videos a way to discover new content. But over time, YouTube gradually pushed the trending feature back, and now it has been replaced by Shorts and personalized recommendations.
Personally, this change is a little emotional. Many of my teenage memories are tied to YouTube’s trending list, where I discovered and started following many of my favorite channels. But with time, technology and trends were bound to change. And now, YouTube has bid farewell to another old but memorable feature.
