[Coffee Break] This is the trending tab visualized.
There are over 40,000 videos here with over 2,000 unique channels
all represented on this graph here.
All of that and more will be explained right now.
[h3h3Productions] I'm trying to learn how to go trending from this video.
I'm trying to understand. What does YouTube want from- from us as creators?
[Shane Dawson] A clip from the show "The View" that has 10,000 views is not trending (but it's number three trend).
That's when you start to think "Oh, [this isn't real?]."
[YouTuber] I want to show you a clip from the trending tab.
And, as you can see, a lot of the videos don't seem to be made by creators.
[Coffee Break Intro]
The trending tab is the most talked about, least understood part of YouTube and part of that's because,
for a long time, we've had nothing but anecdote and speculation.
But today I'm hoping that changes, because for the last few months
I've been analyzing a data set that covers seven months of trending history for November 2017 to June 2018.
Now, if you want to know about the person who created the data set (Mitchell Jolly)
if you wanted to know how I analyzed the data set...
I know a lot of you don't care.
So we're gonna just put it in a second video,
but for now, we're just gonna talk about the results.
I'm gonna catch you up to speed with how we got to that first intro shot and we're gonna do it really quickly.
So we start with a huge amount of data: 40,000 entries.
A lot of my reason for doing this is I want to answer the age-old question:
"Is YouTube biased towards traditional media?"
So if we're gonna answer this question,
we have to classify all the channels that trend and find out if they're traditional media or not.
I had to make some definitions of my own here (for the types of channels that are traditional media versus what is a YouTuber or independent creator)
and I made a few other classifications as well
and now all we have to do is figure out which of these two thousand channels is which.
Manual classification like this would take way too long for one person,
so I enlisted 70 people from my second channel in order to help me crowdsource this data classification.
And when that's all finished you get this.
So, this is what we get. How do we read it?
Uh, so the first thing is- is the color key.
Blue will be traditional media.
Orange is commercial.
Uh, green is movies, trailers, video games.
Red is music.
Purple is YouTuber.
And brown is conventional viral (anyone who trended with less than 10,000 subscribers.)
So, what do we get?
All right, so the y-axis is the average view count, uh, they got before they got on trending.
So as soon as [they] got, we see them on trending.
How many views [did] they have when that happens?
So we can think of that as sort of the barrier to them getting on trending.
How many views they needed to get on trending?
And then we have the number of unique trending videos.
So, let's do a, for instance, let's say you have, uh, I don't know, Lele Pons.
She seems to have trended about 10 times on the Trending tab.
And she- it took her about four million views, on average, to get on trending those ten times.
Okay, so that's how to read this. So what do we find?
Uh.
Well, the data is pretty clear.
Number one: if you are high up on this, you're not going to be trending a lot.
The chances are- you don't- we don't see you trend a lot and that sort of makes intuitive sense.
If it takes you a lot of views to trend, you're a lot less likely to trend a lot because, it's very hard to get those views.
Now, who do we find...
trending a lot?
Who do we find with- a lot of times on trending?
Uh, the answer is overwhelmingly...
Traditional media.
Traditional media, as in ESPN,
as in The Ellen Show, Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, Netflix, NBA, CNN, Vox.
All- Almost all late night or, like, su- Traditional me- like
the most mainstream of mainstream media is who we see over-represented on trending over and over and over again.
And I want to stress:
This is not due to the fact they're getting more views than these other YouTubers are.
For example, if Logan Paul's barrier to trending is about 11 million views, then no matter how much he uploads
he's a lot less likely to trend frequently than someone like ESPN, whose barrier to trending is, on average, about 500,000 views.
But that's not all, though. Something else caught my eye:
PewDiePie.
His trending data is super interesting because he trends all over the world,
yet he barely trends in the US.
Now, here's where I tell you that we don't just have the US dataset. We have all these other countries, too.
And when you look at those countries, PewDiePie is crushing it everywhere
*except the US*
even in non-English speaking countries.
If this is a simple algorithm, it's bizarre that the US would be the one place he does so poorly.
Now, YouTube has mentioned for some time that they have human moderators.
Perhaps he gets blocked most of the time, but how do you test that?
I decided to look at other controversial creators to see how they fared on the Trending tab in the United States.
Many of these are US-based channels.
So if they did poorly in the US, but not in other countries, it'd be evidence of, perhaps, some suppression in the US.
I decided to compare the trending rates in the US with Canada.
This is because Canada is operating in the same time zones.
They have similar cultural interests and they also speak English.
Now all of these controversial creators are extremely popular and have some level of swearing or edginess to them.
And this is what I found on the US side: many of these creators aren't trending at *all*,
or if they are trending, it's once or twice and that's it.
For comparison, here's the Canadian side of things.
So this is just an insane difference, it's night and day.
I mean, people like Joe Rogan are trending zero times in America and they're trending a hundred times in Canada, even though Joe Rogan is American based.
People like h3 are trending maybe 60 times in Canada, one time in the United States.
Philip DeFranco is trending two times in the United States, he's trending 87 times in Canada
And I know you're thinking: "Well, maybe Canada's just totally a different beast, even though we did expect it to be pretty similar."
Well, if we look at the top 12 channels who trended in America we actually don't see that.
We see what we'd expect: relatively similar trending numbers.
So Canada being slightly different does not explain why these controversial creators are doing so poorly.
The only thing that makes up for it is, maybe, the idea that America had moderation at this point and Canada had a lot less moderation.
so these controversial channels were free to trend.
So we may have unwittingly gotten an accurate view of how much some of these YouTubers would be trending if it weren't for human intervention.
Now I have to remind you here that that's a theory, but we haven't even gotten to the worst part,
which is the double standard YouTube seems to have for what is banned on the trending tab for YouTubers and traditional media.
Like maybe I can understand that you want to show family-friendly content.
But why is late-night comedy always allowed and considered appropriate while these creators aren't?
Late-night swears too. And, even though they bleep out some of it, they keep other parts. Like, why is this okay?
(and these bleeps are my own, by the way)
[compilation of late-night swears that have been intentionally censored by Coffee Break]
[Shane Dawson] I've also heard, like, their go-to is just "Well, you cuss" and I'm like "So does everybody else!"
Like they trended a song that was, like, controversial about, like, [the roles?] and Cardi B was in it.
["Clout" by Offset plays, with the swears censored]
They trended, I don't. It feels very personal to me, which is why I hear...
[Racka Racka] Like, pick and choose who the rules apply to.
The rules apply to some people and the rules do not apply to other people.
You guys are pushing already established filmmakers and letting them do whatever they want.
How about you promote and help up-and-coming filmmakers that are made on your platform?
[Coffee Break] Yeah.
I think that point by the Racka Racka guys really encapsulates how a lot of creators are feeling right now,
that they're feeling disenfranchised by the platform that they helped build
and they feel like it's unfair, and there's certainly a lot of evidence to support that.
Finally, the last thing I noticed was just how news was treated on YouTube.
So there's a thing called "category_id" in our data set.
Categories include entertainment, education, and even news.
And I got curious when I saw CNN, Vox and The Washington Post doing so well on trending,
so I started to think: "How much of news on the trending tab is mainstream news versus alternative news?"
(and I mean alternative in the sense of independent, not in terms of their politics)
So to find out, I filtered our data set by news and graphed it the same way we did our last video, and this is what we find:
95% of all news takes on trending is traditional media.
That's ridiculously unfair to anyone seriously trying to do news right now independently.
Philip DeFranco, for example, is one of the few YouTubers who even appeared on trending
and it took him 1.4 million views on average to appear those two times on trending.
In comparison, The Associated Press trended seven times.
And how many views did it take them to appear in trending?
10,000.
This is just a different bar and standard for independent creators.
If there is a standard to which we all should be set to, it should be an equal one.
And, look, before we move on, I know YouTube has sort of made a creator memo.
They've said: "Oh, we're gonna fix all this. We're gonna, you know, bump up the creator ratio to at least 50%".
And all I'll say is that it's not about percentages.
It's about a level playing field.
And what I mean by that is, look.
What's unfair in all of this has nothing to do with an extra creator here or there making it to trending.
What's unfair is that YouTube has clearly put their hands on the levers to make it literally easier for traditional media to get on trending.
What's unfair is that controversial YouTubers get held to a different standard than traditional media
and that 95% of news on Trending on YouTube is all mainstream takes.
So while I think YouTube is right in taking the first steps in fixing the system, it's about more than fixing a simple ratio.
It's about giving the creators who built this platform a fair chance.
["give us a (real) chance" by Marc Rebillet plays]
Thank you so much for watching that video.
The last thing I want to say is, sort of,
um, to answer an objection that I know I'd have while watching this video if I didn't do the research myself.
And, um, it's along the lines of a realization that I had while researching this video and it shaped the way I made it.
Which is that, if you're a savvy viewer,
you probably noticed I only checked out the relationship with views and trending,
and you might be saying: "Well, don't you know, Steven, that the trending algorithm considers a sm- any number of signals.
There's a lot more signals that YouTube considers.
Why didn't you consider any of those? Why don't you try to figure out what those had to do with it?"
And I'll say a few things there.
Number one: I- I actually did try. I- I looked at things like likes, dislikes, comments.
Um, I scraped for subscriber counts.
I checked out the median view count of someone's channel versus the performance of their trending video and st- tried to see if there is a relationship there.
And the answer is that there's not- none of those are the Silver Bullet to what we might call "trend ability".
Uh, and my revelation, sort of, about black boxes-
and if you don't know what black box is, something where you have input, you have some-
something that nobody really quite understands, an algorithm (most of the time), um, and you have some kind of output.
What I realized was, rather than focusing on the algorithm, which contains signals that we do not have access to,
such as shares, where the views are coming from, what views YouTube is even considering outside of YouTube itself,
we don't have access to any of that back-end data.
So we literally don't have access to some of the key variables.
So when that's the case, instead of trying to deconstruct this, we can look at this, we can look at what the output is,
because we know the input,
and if we have the- we have the algorithm,
we sort of have the output, but it's also the case that if you have the output and the input,
you can make inference as to what the algorithm, the black box, is.
And that's what this video is all about.
So my intention, when only talking about views, was to shift the conversation away from this, and to talk about this.
Because this is, in the end, what actually matters when you're talking about a systemic bias.
Um, regardless of whether there's explicit or implicit biases here,
whether human moderation or just YouTube's choices and what they favor,
uh, traditional media is getting the bulk of the attention, you might say,
they have a different standard for them.
And that is what I wanted to highlight in this video.
So, I know I didn't get to everything.
I know I didn't cover YouTube's own intentions.
I know I didn't talk about every angle of this, this is not the end-all be-all take on the trending tab,
but I wanted to give you a little insight into why I focused on this side of things.
So, thank you so much for watching! Thank you to my patrons, everyone who's supports me on Patreon,
it's a huge part of this channel, and I hope you have a wonderful day.
Check out that second video if you want to see the nuts and bolts, and I'll see you later.
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