Having your video chart on the YouTube trending page is a sign you’ve truly made it as a creator. When it comes to online video, the trending page is equivalent to the Billboard music charts. However, getting your video to trend is much easier said than done.

These are the factors that can get your video on the YouTube trending page.

Generally, videos with wide appeal are more likely to trend.

Unlike a user’s home page, the trending page is not personalized to every individual. Instead, every single viewer is shown the same videos. Therefore, YouTube prefers to showcase videos that appeal to a wide variety of users.

YouTube Help outlines several criteria that they search for in trending videos. Besides having wide appeal, YouTube aims to rank videos that are novel, surprising, diverse, and relevant to what’s going on in the world. However, videos that are too sensational, misleading, or clickbaity are unlikely to trend.

View count is the most important stat.

The trending page is designed to collect all the videos that are going viral in one place. These are the videos everyone seems to be watching and sharing. Most of them have anywhere from hundreds of thousands to tens of millions of views.

So, if you want your video to trend, the most important factor to focus on is your view count. It doesn’t matter if you have ten subscribers or ten million. In fact, plenty of smaller channels has seen their subscriber counts blow up after a trending video.

When you get the views matters, too.

Besides the view count itself, YouTube also considers the “temperature” of the video. The trending page is for what’s hot right now. If this wasn’t taken into consideration, then the trending page could be dominated by videos that got hundreds of millions of views several years ago!

In order for a video to trend, not only does it need to get views, but it needs to get views super quickly. That’s why it’s important to remind your viewers to share your videos in the call-to-action.

Where the views are coming from also contributes.

Oftentimes, YouTube videos are embedded outside of the platform. Videos can garner tons of views from news sites, blogs, or social media. The trending algorithm takes the origin of outside views into consideration.

Your best bet is to try to get as many views originating on YouTube as possible. While YouTube doesn’t explain exactly how this factor affects trending videos, it does specify that it wants trending videos to be relevant to the viewers and reflective of the platform’s content.

Trending videos must follow all Community Guidelines.

As a result of previous incidents, YouTube has strong filters in place to prevent videos that break the Community Guidelines from reaching the trending page. Any video that trends also undergoes human review.

Therefore, if you want your videos to trend, you should be sure to follow all the platform’s policies and guidelines. Focus on content that is advertiser-friendly, timely, and of wide appeal.

To get on the YouTube trending page, a video needs to get a lot of views extremely quickly. However, the size of your channel doesn’t matter. The most important factor is the quality of the content you produce.