Wondering what’s hot on YouTube? Need to know what the latest video craze is for a certain demographic or geographic segment? YouTube provides this information with their YouTube Trends Dashboard and lets you compare one segment to another (both by most shared and most viewed). YouTube also curates content for newsworthy posts every weekday (this is aimed at bloggers and news outlets) on their YouTube Trends blog. YouTube has recognized that their content is often used in news reports and is taking steps to make it easier for publishers to find quality content. Hopefully, they’ll also add the ability to segment on topic.
The Trends Dashboard allows you to view and compare the most viewed (in past 24 hours) and most shared (on Twitter and Facebook in the last 24 hours) videos by location, gender and age group. It’s also possible to highlight unique (videos unique to one upload list) and common videos (exist on more than one list).
YouTube is also curating content in daily blog posts, divided into categories. I’d love to see this expanded so that there are daily posts for each category (or some way to sort by topic or category in the dashboard). Unfortunately the last post in advertising was way back in February. To be fair, YouTube’s efforts are mostly directed at news outlets.
Have you used either YouTube Trends or the Dashboard? How?