Global YouTube Trending Dataset (2022-2025): Three Years of Platform-Curated, Cross-National Trends in Digital Culture

TL;DR

This paper introduces a comprehensive three-year dataset of YouTube Trending videos across 104 countries, enabling in-depth analysis of global digital culture, platform influence, and content dynamics over time.

Contribution

It provides the first large-scale, longitudinal, cross-national dataset of YouTube Trending videos with detailed metadata, covering three years and 104 countries.

Findings

Dataset includes 78.4 million videos and 726,627 unique entries.

Provides insights into global and national content trends.

Facilitates research on platform influence and cultural diffusion.

Abstract

On July 1, 2025, YouTube retired its decade-long public "Trending" pages, ending platform-curated, non-personalized video discovery. The Trending list had long served as a vital lens into algorithmic influence, cultural diffusion, and crisis communication globally, offering a rare "ground-truth" reference to study global attention and cultural salience. We present a three-year archival dataset of YouTube Trending videos, collected from July 1, 2022, to June 30, 2025, with four daily snapshots for each of the 104 countries. The dataset includes 446,971 snapshots, each capturing up to 200 trending videos, encompassing 78.4 million video entries (726,627 unique videos) and associated metadata. Each record includes core identifiers (snapshot time, country, rank) and content metadata (video ID, channel ID, title, description, tags, publication date, category, channel name, language, live status, views, and comments). Unlike previous datasets with limited geographic scope or short timeframes, our non-personalized data provides exceptional cross-national and longitudinal coverage for studying digital culture, platform governance, and temporal dynamics in content popularity. We document the data collection methodology, schema design, coverage, descriptive statistics for both global and U.S. trending videos, and the ethical safeguards implemented throughout.