YouTube just made a major change to its trending page

Days after shuttering its dedicated gaming app, YouTube made some more big changes to how users discover content.

Now, YouTube’s trending tab breaks down what's popular in five categories: music, live, gaming, news, and movies.

SEE ALSO:YouTube will close YouTube Gaming, move it all to the main site

Trending on YouTube previously just displayed what videos were trending throughout a user’s country. YouTube said its algorithm takes a number of factors into consideration, such as view count and the rate of growth in views, among others.

Here's what the Trending on YouTube page looked like just earlier today.Credit: YOUTUBE

Now, with all of those same ranking factors in place, YouTube is giving you the option of seeing what’s trending in those five aforementioned categories. It will also show you what's trending across all of YouTube in your country.

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Here's how Trending on YouTube looks like now with the content category pages up top.Credit: YOUTUBE

On Friday afternoon, the top overall trending videos on YouTube consisted of Google’s video celebrating Mr. Rogers, NFL highlights, and a clip from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.Each trending category page served up something completely different.

At the top of the trending page for music was the Lil Peep/XXXTENTACION mashup from two days ago, with videos from Nicki Minaj, Lil Pump, and Eminem (which were uploaded one to two weeks ago) following right behind.

The gaming trending page served up lots of Fortnitegameplay videos. The movies page had recent trailers. The news trending page doubled down on what YouTube said yesterday about focusing on “news sources when people enter news-seeking queries." It showed recent videos from CNN, CBS News, and TIME.

The live trending page seemed to be the only place where less known YouTube channels could break through. It displayed a number of “chill music” streams, a live political show from Randi Rhodes, and a stream from a conservative channel talking about the QAnon conspiracy theory.

As Tubefilter points out, YouTube seems to be making moves to help new users discover recent content that doesn’t necessarily feature YouTube’s homegrown stars.

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