Watch time of any video is primary reason for it to be trending, followed by views, likes, comments and sharing of videos. YouTube usually takes maximum 2 hours to index any video and it compares the all the important video metrics on a given time for all videos getting views in a certain region.
Trending helps viewers see what’s happening on YouTube and in the world. Trending aims to surface videos that a wide range of viewers would find interesting. Some trends are predictable, like a new song from a popular artist or a new movie trailer. Others are surprising, like a viral video.
Trending isn’t personalized and displays the same list of trending videos in each country to all users, which is why you may see videos in Trending that aren’t in the same language as your browser. However, in India, Trending displays the same list of trending videos for each of the 9 most common Indic languages.
The list of trending videos is updated roughly every 15 minutes. With each update, videos may move up, down, or stay in the same position in the list.
Here Are YouTube’s Official Criteria For A ‘Trending’ Video
According to Google’s official materials, YouTube Trending aims to surface videos that:
- Are appealing to a wide range of viewers
- Are not misleading, click-bait or sensational
- Capture the breadth of what’s happening on YouTube and in the world
- Ideally, are surprising or novel
YouTube also considers many signals, including (but not limited to):
- View count
- The rate of growth in views
- Where views are coming from (including outside of YouTube)
- The age of the video
How The YouTube Algorithm Works
Just about everything on YouTube is aimed at increasing the “watch time” of a video. Contrary to what you might think, though, watch time involves more than just the number of minutes a video is watched. It includes the number of views, the duration of those views, the number of session starts, the frequency of video uploads, the session duration, and how many sessions end on the video. It’s all just a bunch of metrics that indicate how often people come to your channel, how well they stay on YouTube once they’re on your channel, and how good your channel is at bringing in new viewers. Here are few tips that you can apply to trend your video on YouTube.
Engage Your Existing Subscribers To View The Video Quickly
Perhaps the number one most important thing you can do for a video is get a strong burst of views in the first three days after the video comes out. It doesn’t necessarily matter where those views come from, so long as they’re real and valid views, but it’s easiest to get them from your subscribers.
The best way to do this is to set up some kind of off-site means of contacting your subscribers. Getting people to sign up for a mailing list, or at least just set up notifications for when you publish new content, can be great. Also, whenever you publish a video, if you have a blog you should publish an article on the same topic and embed the video.
Write An Effective Video Description
Give your video at least 300 words of a description packed with keywords and phrases related to your brand and industry. So, write the description after you do your keyword research. Emphasis pull quotes and comments that give insight to the content in the video. Also, link to content related to the video that offers further information or a place for purchase with branded, tagged URLs.
Encourage Longer Views
Longer views are empirically better than shorter views, though complete views of a Vine-length video work just fine. If you’re concerned about marketing and not just meme-producing, though, you’re going to want to produce longer videos. Make your video length at least 10 minutes.
Get People From Off-Site To Browse YouTube
You should use every method you can think of to refer people to YouTube via landing on your channel. When your channel is the start of a session for a lot of people, and those people stick around on YouTube for more than just the one video, you’re bringing tangible value to YouTube itself. They obviously want to promote this, so they encourage more views to the channels that bring in people. It keeps you wanting to use the site, since you’re getting value out of it yourself.
Add Tags properly
Tags are essentially keywords. They are entered when uploading or editing the video and offer insight for the platform’s discovery system about the video’s topic and content. Include your brand’s name and related tags. If you’re stuck use YouTube’s auto suggest tool.
