Half of YouTube videos in ‘Trending’ tab will soon be from creators

YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki today provided a two-month update on the video site’s goals for 2019. One development to support creators is making sure that half of the videos in the Trending tab come from YouTubers.

Wojcicki noted criticism of how the second tab in the YouTube apps and site “doesn’t seem to reflect what people are watching on the platform.” Particularly, how “too many of the same creators show up time and time again.” Given its prominent placement in the app, this feed is catered towards showing videos that would be interesting and safe to a wide swath of viewers.

One thing to keep in mind is that trending is meant to show content that a wide range of viewers would find interesting. So we’re especially careful about the safety of these videos and we ensure they don’t contain profanity or mature content. Eligible videos are then ranked based on a calculation of their “temperature”—how quickly that video is generating views.

To better showcase creators, at least half the videos in Trending will come from YouTubers. According to the CEO, this change will take place “going forward” and that YouTube is already close to achieving that goal. Music and traditional media will populate the rest of the feed.

We also plan to make sure this is a diverse set of creators. And we’ll continue to ramp up our Creator on the Rise and Gaming Creator on the Rise initiatives.

Another update today acknowledges that YouTube is working on changing how the Manual Claiming system is being used to flag “very short (in some cases one second) content or incidental content.” However, there are no updates on that front today as YouTube works to find the “right balance.”

We were already looking into this issue but hearing this directly from creators was vital. We are exploring improvements in striking the right balance between copyright owners and creators.

Meanwhile, to help creators understand what is advertiser friendly, Google is adding more detailed policies, and increasing the accuracy of systems that identify content.

And on monetization, we’ll continue to focus on increasing the accuracy of the classifiers representing the advertising friendly guidelines, something we know is important for all creators. Since January, we’ve already improved the precision of the classifier by 25%.