The Views: Trends, Teams and Tears
Creators on YouTube are constantly trying to create new and exciting content while sticking to what is trendy and relevant. Right now, YouTube has seen an insurgence of family vloggers taking over the trending page. One of these popular family channels is the Prince family which gives their 5.27 million subscribers a glimpse into their lavish life. Another trend going around YouTube is that of the reality show. Kian and JC created “The Reality House” where YouTubers compete for money and James Charles recently announced a competition show he is working on to find the next best beauty influencer. Following in these footsteps, the Prince family has created their own reality show called Trapped with the Prince Family. Parents Damien and Bianca host the show with comedian Jeff Shelley where couples compete for a cash prize and a trip to Hawaii. The show lasted eight episodes that premiered every day. The show has its own elaborate intro with a custom theme song to set the extravagant tone of the show.
Most recently trending was a competition for couples where the men had to scoop fish that have been tied in a bag and stuck to the bottom of a pool and hand them off to their partners waiting at the surface. Then, the women run to put the fish in buckets, and the couple with the most fish wins. The long-form video and the high energy of the competition explain why this video surpassed two million views after only three days. The lure of competition ensures viewership and the intense activity packed into every second of the twenty-minute-long videos equates with success in the YouTube algorithm. The Prince family masterfully stepped outside of family vlogger content for a moment to create something unique while remaining relevant. The Prince’s family continues to think outside the box as they tease a Prince family documentary immediately after concluding their own reality show.
24-hour challenges have been popular on YouTube for years now. However, making them relevant and unique today is a challenge. Huge channels such as Buzzfeed Video which have over 17 million subscribers, find a way to make them trend again. For their most recent challenge, Buzzfeed creator Inga visits Tokyo, Japan to attempt to eat only clear foods for 24 hours. Inga takes the 500,000 viewers to a Japanese supermarket where she finds everything from mochi to coke in clear or translucent colors. Having done her research, Inga even finds clear soy sauce. Inga then takes us through her day eating her clear foods and preparing meals from the translucent items she purchased. This video gives viewers a unique way to explore another culture through one specific kind of food from someone experienced and well-researched. It provides an interesting way to explore another culture, offers new foods and cooking techniques to try, and makes for a completely engaging video, despite it being almost twenty minutes long. Buzzfeed never fails to make engaging and entertaining content that stands apart from the crowd.
The trending page on YouTube has become a scary place for sketch comedy. Rarely do sketch comedy creators reach enough viewers to make it onto the page, but one channel stands out. Dan and Riya of the channel bearing the same name have created a name for themselves through their unique characters and relatable sketches. The comedy duo has almost two million subscribers as they shapeshift into multiple different characters and relay common occurrences in high school and beyond. In their most recent video, Riya plays herself and Dan plays her spoiled best friend Tootsie as they take their mothers on a spa getaway. Conflict erupts when Riya’s mom, played by Dan wants to make traditional Indian daal in their hotel room rather than ordering Uber eats which becomes too spicy for Dan’s mom, also played by Dan, to eat. As in most of their videos, Dan and Riya use humor to compare the experience of having an immigrant mother in Riya’s case to Tootsie’s all-American extravagant lifestyle. The moms clash heads on topics such as food, dating, and exercise as their daughters watch from the sidelines. Dan and Riya’s original and comedic content never fails to rake in the views with this video reaching almost three million. They continue to draw viewers in by remaining relatable and creating characters that viewers can follow easily and look forward to what will come next.
When creators share their romantic relationships with their subscribers, viewers can get attached, especially when watching a couple grow up together on YouTube for years at a time. This is true of Safiya Nygaard who was already dating Tyler Williams when she created her own YouTube channel after leaving a job at Buzzfeed. The two work on videos together and share their relationship openly with Nygaard’s 8 million subscribers. When Tyler proposed, he filmed the whole process. Since that moment, Nygaard has been documenting her wedding planning journey on her channel including buying a wedding dress and exploring wedding fashion from different decades. Now, the happily married couple has finally shared the video of their wedding.
The two take a different approaches to the wedding video. There are no drone shots or voice-overs. Instead, the two sit down to narrate the footage that each took of their wedding day from the moment they woke up. Five million viewers can see Nygaard and Williams get ready for their nuptials with a few hiccups along the way. They provide close-up looks of the venue and decor with peeks into the couple’s vows, speeches, and choreographed first dance. The video is classy, beautiful to watch, and immaculately done. Anyone who has been following their journey is sure to shed a tear like a duo did multiple times throughout the day. Videos like these make subscribers feel special and deserving of sharing such a personal and intimate moment in a person’s life. After seeing Tyler and Safiya date publicly for years and then plan their wedding for all of 2019, the video is perfectly sweet and romantic and the perfect ending to a lovely saga.