Analysis of all YouTube trending videos in US for 2019

Doesn't the one activity wholly subsidize the other?

> Similar things happen to the thumbnails, which start containing more and more exaggerated, sometimes creepily-so, faces, reacting to absurd images that last for a fraction of a second in the video.

There was a nice little examination of this phenomenon, dubbed YouTube Face, a couple of years ago.

Article: https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2018/04/your-pretty-face-is-goi...

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16803937

My theory is that not everyone has their empathy highly developed, so if you exaggerate an expression you throw a wider net of people picking up the social cue and find it relatable vs micro expressions that only a minority that is observant/empathic would pick up on. This would apply to anything, even day to day interactions.

If you miss the "old YouTube" you really owe it to yourself to check out tiktok. The diversity of content there is great and nothing is even close to 10 minutes. Most YouTube videos are 30-60 seconds of good content diluted to 10:01 so they can be monetized.

This, 100%.

I really wish it was easy to filter and ban videos, artists and types cause I really hate alot of the content on YouTube now.

I've disabled comments via ublock, and the experience is more pleasant, but you do lose those gems from random people sharing knowledge or a similar song or artist.

Not worth it to read through though, to much low hanging fruit and memes.

This and people thinking Facebook is internet. :(

I remember back before the ad algorithm was changed to be more favorable to ~10 minute videos, there was some complaining about how YouTube was all short, stupid videos and long form more substantial content was not viable.

Personally I prefer a YouTube where the meaningful 10 minute content is viable, even if it means there's some lame content which extended to meet a minimum time.

I love the longer videos, and don't really enjoy the short-form content.

I watch a lot of maker content, and a 15-20 minute clip is great. I'm very glad they are able to make enough money from it to do it full time.

TV-style YouTube like Guga or Sonny Side have equaled or surpassed classic “real” TV (eg Discovery channel in the 90s) in both production values and content. That’s definitely something that has happened in the last couple of years

It's incredibly sad, but it's due to our own collective demand imo.

Andrew Schultz a comedian, saw a huge uptick in his success when he started doing short form videos. Ironically he also saw that people would stay on his channel longer. (described in his ted talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl2MQq4qO4Y)

Giving the user a random reward and choice more frequently between each video seems to add to the dopamine hit. And thus the addictiveness. I've certainly gone down the rabbit hole of YT myself watching 1min seinfeld clips from different episodes.

Proper deep-dives into things with long-form content are great. I'll happily watch a 50 minute documentary by History Time, or a 2 hour deconstruction of tropes in 90s crpgs by Chris Davis. For me (and I know I speak entirely subjectively), anything less than half an hour on a subject tends to be just skimming the surface. I'm happy with the way youtube is moving towards longer form essay style content in gaming, music criticism, history, literature theories, science, geopolitics, programming and the like. Often, I wish channels like for example Caspian Report did _longer_ videos on the subjects they handle, because although people have short attention span, I think 10 minutes isn't enough time to properly talk about the politics of the countries they cover.

5 minute videos of disposable entertainment just don't really do it for me.

Can't agree more except for the long-videos thing.

The way YouTube works now encourages clickbait crying-for-a-click titles and silly-shocked-faces thumbnails because click-through-rate plays a huge role in video success now.

In his video [0], that youtuber explains that and why he was going to shift toward using clickbait titles in his channel. Because otherwise, you would not thrive on YT.

For long videos, I think sometimes even 10 minutes are not enough to convey a substantial message in a video. But I think you mean those youtubers that prolong their videos longer—without added value—just for more ads.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHsa9DqmId8

Soon, it will be back to 8 minutes. YouTube is changing the required length for mid-video ads.

I like that. Excellent storytelling, inspiring. Thank you for sharing.

Thank you.. The analysis you've done seems really interesting and gave me some more ideas to implement in future analyses.

For keywords that boost views, I'll run a similar analysis on my data and report the results to you here in another comment. Probably this weekend.

And I just heard from you that YouTube is starting to close up access to their API. I visit YT API website from time to time but haven't noticed such a thing. It's really a bummer. They should be more open not the opposite. Do you have some source if I want to know more about that?

Glad it helped. If possible, could you share your analysis results with us after you finish?

There is a video that had only 53,796 views on the day it became trending. That video is "Phora - Don't Change [Official Music Video]". If you look at the data, you find that it became trending on the same day it was published. So before accumulating a large number of views, it became trending. Maybe it acquired thousands of views very quickly which sent it to the trending list? Maybe other factor.

I have the same data for Canada, Denmark, UK, Malaysia, and other 13 countries. I plan to analyze this data soon. So stay tuned.