How to Make Your Video Trend on YouTube! (Not Clickbait)
A Data Driven Approach
By Aaron Lee, Aden Chiu, Charlotte Huang, Grace Panos, Michelle Lee, and Teresa Rexin
Overview
YouTube is the largest online streaming platform in the world! Videos posted on the website can be viewed by users anywhere; this offers content exposure at an unprecedented scale. Thousands of creators have used this platform to gain a following and have gone on to monetize their online popularity. On the front page of their website, YouTube links a list of Trending videos. Every user in the country can access the Trending list. This is an invaluable tool for upcoming artists who want to expand their viewership. YouTube defines Trending as popular videos that appeal to a large audience. The criteria for a video to become trending is based upon a variety of factors including, but not limited to:
- View count
- Rate at which a video gains views
- Age of the video
Creators should utilize this data in order to get a better sense of what content their viewers are interested in.
Motivation
Our team looked into US YouTube Trending video data from November 2017 to June 2018 obtained from Kaggle to determine what elements were associated with a video’s eligibility to be on the Trending list. Some factors that we decided to look into were category, tags, view count, and how long the video had been on the platform. Using R, we created a variety of visualizations to illustrate trends in the dataset. To organize our article, we picked the three most popular categories to analyze.
As you can see, Entertainment, Music, and Howto & Style categories have the most videos on the trending list from the data. Our team worked to propose recommendations for creating a trending video based on the patterns we found analyzing the dataset. We hope that our findings help creators be successful on their journey!
Background
To create our definition of a “trending video”, we first wanted to take a look at which channels have consistently produced videos that appear on the Trending list. We grouped the dataset by YouTube channel and calculated the distinct number of videos from each channel that made the trending list. We removed duplicated instances of a particular video ID and retained the last occurance. This ensured we would count a distinct video multiple times and keep the occurrence with the highest number of views, likes, dislikes, and comments. We summed the views for each channel from these distinct Trending videos to see if there was a relationship between the channels with the most trending videos and the most overall views.
Each point in the plot graph above represents a different channel, and the points with blue shading signify channels with more than 100,000,000 overall views or more than 34 distinct Trending videos.
From the graph, we found that most channels that produce videos with the highest number of views do not have videos that appear regularly on the Trending list. One possible explanation is those channels, such as ibighit (home of BTS and other K-pop music videos), ChildishGambinoVEVO, and Marvel Entertainment release videos like movie trailers and music videos irregularly. These videos can garner hundreds of millions of views at once. Due to their irregular upload pattern, which is only when new movies or music are being produced, they do not appear on the Trending list regularly. Others like Dude Perfect and YouTube Spotlight (former name of the channel which uploads the yearly YouTube Rewind) have a few viral videos that amassed an exponentially large number of views. On the other hand, channels who upload regularly, like talk-show and sports channels such as ESPN, TheEllenShow, The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live, appear on the Trending list far more often, even if they do not have as many views as compared to the previous types of channels.
This shows that the channels with the highest number of views do not necessarily have the highest number of trending videos. So let’s look at some other factors that make a video trend!
What Time is it? Trending Time!
Ever wondered how long it should take for your video to make it onto the YouTube trending list? There is a lot of traffic on the YouTube website. So, the platform needs time to process how fast each video is gaining views to determine whether or not it is popular enough to be considered Trending. Our team looked into how long it would take a typical video to start trending. This information will help you determine whether or not your video is likely to start trending after it has been on the platform for a certain number of days.
Overall, it takes videos less than 2.5 days to appear on YouTube’s trending page. All of the individual categories show a similar trend. For the top three categories that appear on the Trending list, music videos tend to start trending faster than Howto & Style and Entertainment videos. By the tenth day, there is an extremely slim chance for any video to appear on the trending page. This doesn’t mean producers should lose hope, there are many cases where a video has made it to the trending list hundreds of days after being posted. In fact, a Budweiser advertisement that was posted in 2006 started trending in February 2018 (on Superbowl Sunday of course) 4,215 days after being posted. So there’s hope for every video!
♫ Grow, Grow, Grow Your Views ♫
To give you an idea of what the threshold is for videos to stay on the Trending list for multiple weeks, we explored the growth in the number of likes and views for videos that stay on the trending list for at least 8 days (25th quantile). The growth is defined as the rate of increase for likes and views between consecutive days, and the threshold for each video is the last calculated growth value. We then took an average of videos in the same category. The bar chart below compares the threshold of growth in views and likes between the top three popular categories, Entertainment, Music, and Howto & Style.
Based on the graph, we can conclude that Music videos need to have the largest growth in both views and likes in order to remain on the trending list. On the other hand, we can observe that Howto & Style videos require the smallest growth in both views and likes in order to remain on the trending list, relative to the other categories. In general, it is interesting to note that the required threshold for the growth in views is greater for the required threshold for the growth in likes.
To Tag Or Not To Tag?
Besides analyzing growth in likes and views, another way to understand trending videos is by analyzing tags. Tags are not visible to the public; they are embedded in the backend of the video description. But, tags improve a video’s searchability and popularity. Here, we used the dataset as a whole to get a better idea of how many tags each video uses.
In the dataset, the tags were displayed in a single column, with each individual tag separated by a vertical bar. We were able to clean this column by separating out the tags and creating a new column “tags_count” to count the number of tags per video.
We created a histogram reflecting the number of videos with a particular number of tags. The distribution is right skewed with a median and average of about 19 tags per video.
From the bar graph, we see that most videos have about 6–10 tags with their video. We recommend for content creators to use a similar number of relevant tags, which will make it easier for viewers to find their video and more helpful to increase views and user interaction. Tagging an excess of unrelated content does not seem to help the video grow much in popularity. Let’s look into some keywords that we recommend creators to use.
We created word clouds of tag words and phrases for the top 3 categories to identify which keywords may help your video gain more likes and views. The larger the size of the word, the more frequent it appears as a tag in trending videos. Different colors also represent different frequencies.
Based on the word clouds, you can get a sense of typical words that YouTubers use to tag their videos. ‘Funny’ and ‘comedy’ are frequently used in Entertainment videos, which isn’t particularly surprising — everyone can use a laugh once in a while.
Tags for videos in the music are more likely to include ‘pop’, ‘new’, and ‘official’, since Trending music often reflects the most recent songs and artists. Besides these keywords, two other interesting tags are ‘Marshmallow’ and ‘Charlie Puth’, indicating the popularity of these two music artists, especially from the end of 2017 to mid 2018, the range of this dataset.
For Howto & Style videos, one extremely important tag keyword is ‘makeup’, and others are ‘beauty’, ‘food’, and ‘tutorial’. From these results, we can conclude that Howto & Style is the right category to mark your video if you want to publish a makeup tutorial or share a cooking videos.
It’s the Most Wonderful Time…To Upload on YouTube!
Time is another important element to consider when studying trending YouTube videos. When do trending YouTube videos receive the most views, and are there particular times of the year that generate the most activity? To answer these questions, our group investigated the relationship between a video’s trending time and corresponding view count on that day.
We created a heatmap for each of the top three YouTube categories based on views. From November 2017 to June 2018, month is plotted on the x-axis and day is plotted on the y-axis. Each shaded tile represents the aggregate view count of trending videos for a particular category on a certain day. For instance, we can observe that on December 1, 2017, all trending Entertainment YouTube videos garnered a total of approximately 500,000 views.
The first instance of each trending video was removed from the dataset, as there was no way to identify the number of views it garnered on that day seperate from the amount of views it gained prior to trending.
Based on these heatmaps, we can observe the total view count for a particular category of trending YouTube video on any specific day of the year. Also, by noting the shade of each tile on the graphs, we can identify how a certain category fared on a specific day relative to other days on the heatmap. Our goal was to investigate the relative aggregate view counts across different YouTube categories. In particular, we wanted to note patterns in view activity during certain times of year, and whether these trends would be applicable across multiple video categories or be isolated in a single video category.
For Entertainment videos, there is a clear increase in view count in early December and early February. For Music videos, there is no clear trend during the time period given, but there is a slight increase in view count during April and May. For Howto and Style videos, there is a clear increase in view count during early December and mid-January.
Taking the results as a whole, we would recommend posting videos that fall into the Entertainment and Howto and Style videos during early December, where you would have your best chance of garnering views and increasing exposure. For Music videos, we would recommend posting videos during April and May. Of course, we can use the heatmaps to identify other specific “hotspots” for view count for the particular category we are interested in.
Peak view counts for certain categories can potentially be explained by seasonal events. For example, during the period of Thanksgiving and Black Friday, makeup bloggers are active in producing videos about new products. By the time early December comes, these trending videos are able to garner a great amount of views.
So what should you do?
Overall, we found that numerous factors are used when curating YouTube’s Trending videos list, and the weight of different factors — growth of views and likes, tags, timing, etc. — are weighted differently for each distinct category. YouTube’s algorithm to determine its trending videos are complex, yet we uncovered several ways to satisfy its threshold to create Trending videos:
- Videos are more likely to be on the Trending list within 3 days of posting
- Prerequisites for view growth to be considered “trending” depends on the categories
- Recommended tag count should be 6–10 tags, and limited to the most relevant tags
- View counts are seasonal; different categories have different periods during the year where view count is greater
Based on these specific findings from our research, you will have the insights needed to maximize view count and make it onto the trending list. Our team wishes you the best of luck in your journey to become the next Jake Paul (or not).
If you are interested in seeing our code, please visit our github here!
