Recently YouTube revealed their new service, Trends (www.youtube.com/trends), as daily insight into new, most shared and most viewed Youtube videos. While some people might disregard this as another way of self-aggrandizement of popular culture and another method of slipping advertising into your daily life, I was fascinated by the possibilities of a Google trends type analysis tool for YouTube videos. Well, it turns out it's not as cool as all that unless some massive additions are still in the works. The orientation video on the splash page is little more than a glossy overview with some really, really terrible autotune singing. And the link to YouTube charts (as well as a few other areas of the site) hasn't been activated yet. However the most interesting thing I've found is in the top right corner, called "Discover Video Trends Near You...", a misleading site where you can actually browse the most viewed or most shared videos Globally or by major cities or countries. Most shared is the default search, so make sure you change it to most viewed using the link on the upper right of the interface.
You can also have it cross reference across the 3 locations you select to find how many of the top viewed/shared are in common between locations. I consistently found that all of the US cities and Canada had 7-10 of the top 10 listed videos in common with the Global results, whereas on the other side of the world (Japan, Hong Kong, Russia, etc.) often had 0-2 of the top 10 listed in common. This might be because of language difference (although the UK had 2 in common last I checked) or maybe people in Canada and US use YouTube more and internet users in other countries are more likely to use some other kind of video service. Or it means that people in the US and Canada are more likely to check top viewed results when browsing for videos to watch. At any rate, it is interesting to see what people in other countries watch for entertainment, even if it doesn't always make much sense to me.
