It Says A Lot About How We Find What’s Popular Now.
After nearly a decade of surfacing the world’s viral moments, YouTube’s ‘Trending’ section is about to disappear for good. The platform confirmed this week that the Trending page, along with the Trending Now list, will be removed “within the next couple of weeks.”
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Back in 2015, the idea of a single page capturing what was trending made sense. A handful of videos could break the internet, spark parodies, and dominate the conversation for days. But in 2025, virality doesn’t look like that anymore and YouTube knows it.
“Back when we first launched the Trending page in 2015, the answer to ‘what’s trending’ was a lot simpler to capture with a singular list of viral videos that everyone was talking about,” YouTube wrote in its announcement. “But today, trends consist of many videos created by many fandoms, and there are more micro-trends enjoyed by diverse communities than ever before.”
The reality is that people just don’t go to Trending anymore. Shorts, algorithmic recommendations, and TikTok have chipped away at its traffic, with creators arguing for years that the section was more likely to feature studio-backed trailers than genuinely organic hits.
In place of Trending, YouTube wants viewers to lean on personalized recommendations and YouTube Charts, which now rank top-performing content across categories like music, podcasts, and movie trailers, with more to come. For gaming fans, trending clips will live on in the Gaming Explore page.
Meanwhile, creators looking for content inspiration are being pushed toward the AI-powered Inspiration Tab in YouTube Studio. And for newer voices hoping to break out, YouTube says it’s investing more in systems like Hype, a relatively new promotional tool that lets viewers boost videos onto a platform-wide leaderboard.
In the end, the death of Trending feels less like a loss and more like a sign of the times. Virality is no longer a single front page, it’s thousands of niche moments unfolding all at once. And these days, the best way to keep up might just be to let the algorithm decide.