goodbye Youtube trending page
end of an era...kind of
I have been making videos on Youtube for ten and a half years, since I was sixteen. The site has evolved (and devolved) countless times since then. But one thing that is now going away in the year 2025 is the Trending page, which launched in 2015.
I knew this was coming for about two years now. I heard talk of them wanting to faze it out and then saw with my own eyes as not just a creator on the app but as a user the way it became more and more hidden on the site or removed from the app.
Many people at the creator level (myself included) have complained to Youtube over the years about the trending page. The frustration would often be that of say some twenty videos on the trending page at any given time, maybe five of them would be uploads from Youtube creators. There were even rumors (though I do not believe these were ever confirmed outside of a “my friend at Youtube told me” type thing) that there was not just a team in charge of the trending page, as in functionality and such, but a small group that would hand select what was on the trending page at any given time. So if videos from one creator kept ending up on the page? Then that MUST mean they had friends at Youtube.
But overall it became mostly the movie trailer and music video page for some years and then when the Sunday Ticket moved on to Youtube it also became the sports highlight page.
Basically, it was a page that showed the big business side of Youtube and not the creator side for a long while.
But videos from creators could still end up on the trending page. Maybe not in the top ten videos, but it’s always nice to see one of my creator friends post a screenshot of the blue “# X on trending” next to their video title a few hours or even a few days after upload when it would happen. I saw it from a friend as recently as two days before the announcement.
On it’s face this could be good for creators. More chances to rank higher if there are more specific charts. According to discord group I am in for creators and personnell, apparently almost no views came from the trending page in recent years for creators. But at what point was that a self fulfilling prophecy with how much they began hiding it.
Like I said the trending tab has been on it’s way out for a while, but it will officially be fully fazed out in “the next few weeks” according to Tubefilter. Time will tell if this is overall a better move from the creator and casual user perspective.
I made a habit of still checking the trending page on nearly a weekly basis because it’s my job to be online and I think it’s a good idea to know what exactly is being touted as “trending” from time to time. Was I obsessed with it? No. But I still made it part of my work routine. I made a TikTok video about it going away and unsurprisingly all the comments are viewers telling me how long they have been on Youtube and how they never checked the trending page.
So though I think this is the end of a bygone era of fandom on the platform, it will apparently not be missed.