
Entertainment • May 06, 2019

PewDiePie explains why YouTube's trending section is rigged

PewDiePie explains why YouTube's trending section is rigged

Felix ‘PewDiePie’ Kjellberg’s fight for YouTube subscriber supremacy may be all but over, but the hugely popular creator is now turning his attention to addressing some of the problems with the site.


The YouTube trending page has always been a delicate issue on the platform, with both creators and viewers left confused by how it is supposed to work.

It flared up again as a hot topic on May 2, as YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki was caught ‘promising’ rap artist Juice WRLD that the company was going to help his growth on the platform. While some interpreted this as a sort of free hand out of subscribers and a change to the algorithm, PewDiePie isn’t joining that theory, labeling it as “CEO-talk.”


PewDiePie / YouTube
PewDiePie had been locked into a war with T-Series for top spot on YouTube but lost on April 14.

How does YouTube Trending work?

However, the clip did spark a bigger conversation from the Swede, in his most recent 'PewNews' video, addressing Wojcicki’s promises from April that the platform was working to better support creators - with Pewds zeroing in on the trending page and revealing why it doesn’t really work as intended.

“She also talks about the trending tab [in her promises], and they’re saying that they are gonna work on having it half creators and/or at least half will be actual creators on the trending tab,” started Pewds. “So, the trending was rigged all along! I knew it”, he added jokingly.

Despite his humor, the Swede did get pretty serious and broke things down eloquently - explaining that the trending page doesn’t promote all highly viewed videos because it uses a channel’s history of views to determine whether or not the upload in question is worthy of a wider promotion.

[Timestamp of 8:18 for mobile viewers]


Will YouTube make a change?

Pewds also added that he thinks channels, like music and movie companies, which don’t upload frequently and then have a hit, benefit from trending page more than creators who “work on YouTube and care about YouTube” because of how the current system works.

While Wojcicki may have promised changes to the platform in order to better serve those creators who make a living from the platform, it remains to be seen as to what adjustments are made in the coming months. 

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PewDiePie, YouTube