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10 Years Ago This Week: Trending Up

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing tech highlights from 2015 that still resonate 10 years later. This update was for the week ending December 12, 2015.

Ten years ago this week YouTube added a trending tab, to highlight buzzworthy videos. It was removed this past summer, having outlived its usefulness.

Finding Videos That Are Generating Discussion


The YouTube Trending Tab, 11 December 2015. Movie trailers dominated.

In December 2015, YouTube premiered their annual "Rewind video", recapping the top videos of the past year, and announced the brand new Trending tab. 

YouTube suggested that this would be the way to keep up with the hot videos, "on and off YouTube".
... the Trending tab offers a way to see the videos people are watching, discussing, and sharing each and every day via a feed in your YouTube desktop and mobile app. From the most-anticipated new trailers to the hottest music videos to viral clips from the biggest (and smallest) YouTube creators, the Trending tab showcases a wide range of popular and buzzworthy content from across the world of video.
It updated multiple times a day with videos with rapidly rising viewership and “generating discussion both on and off YouTube." If you were looking for a specific kind of content, it could be filtered by topic such as Gaming and News.

About a year later, in January 2017, YouTube added a new section to the Trending tab to highlight Creators on the Rise and Artists on the Rise. This was to highlight emerging creators, who only had to have 1000 subscribers to be eligible.

The View from 2025: Trending for Creators?

The Trending tab was removed in July 2025. You can still find trending music, trailers and top podcasts.

The Trending tab drew complaints from Creators and viewers that mainstream media content from TV shows (like Saturday Night Live sketches and late night talk show clips) and official movie trailers dominated the list.

In early 2019 YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki finally responded with an explanation of how videos were selected for Trending: 
On the trending tab, we’ve heard it doesn’t seem to reflect what people are watching on the platform and that too many of the same creators show up time and time again. One thing to keep in mind is that trending is meant to show content that a wide range of viewers would find interesting. We are especially careful about the safety of what appears here, so we have filters to make sure we don’t show videos that contain mature content (i.e. language, imagery, etc.), violence, or are otherwise inappropriate, such as disparaging others in the community. Eligible videos are then ranked based on a calculation of their “temperature”—how quickly that video is generating views.
A perhaps only slightly uncharitable interpretation is that the Trending tab was designed for inoffensive, generic, lowest common denominator content. 

Wojcicki stated that YouTube had a goal of "at least half the videos on trending come from YouTubers (with the remainder coming from music and traditional media)", which was still not that many Trending slots for Creators native to the platform.

And it would still feature videos that would appeal to the broadest audience. 

So it wasn't too much of a surprise when earlier this year YouTube announced that the Trending tab had finally outlived its usefulness. 
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. Today, trends consist of many videos created by many fandoms, and there are more micro-trends enjoyed by diverse communities than ever before.
And people weren't visiting the Trending page, with YouTube noting "we've seen visits to the Trending page decrease significantly, especially over the last five years."

Now there are separate charts for Trending Music Videos, Top Podcast Shows, and Trending Movie (and other) Trailers. They don’t include trending Creator videos.

Creators do still get shout-outs from YouTube’s social media accounts. 

And truly popular videos are shared all over, on social media, in private chats and communities, with no limitations on how "mature" or offensive they might be.

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