YouTube Rewind 2019 is an improvement, but fans still hate it

By Josh Levenson December 5, 2019

YouTube Rewind 2019 is here, rounding up all of the most popular videos on the platform in 2019. Among them? Music from the likes of Billie Eilish and Lil Nas X, as well as entertainment from popular creators like MrBeast and PewDiePie, and content related to Fortnite and Minecraft.

Addressing the elephant in the room, YouTube acknowledged that its hand-crafted approach to Rewind 2018 didn’t quite have the intended effect — so much so it fast became the most disliked video on the content-sharing service, dethroning Justin Bieber’s Baby, with 17 million thumbs-down.

“This year, we tried something different and looked at what you did like — a lot,” explains YouTube. “Our Rewind 2019 video compiles the top videos and creators that you liked and watched the most around the world, from the biggest games to must-watch beauty palettes and breakout stars.”

The result? A YouTube Rewind that’s based first on foremost on metrics — made up of what people liked and watched the most, and not what YouTube thinks people liked. So in a nutshell, YouTube Rewind 2019 should be a lot more relatable to the average YouTube user, because it’s statistic-driven.

Boring perquisites aside, let’s take a look at the video itself:

YouTube Rewind 2019: For the Record | #YouTubeRewind

Another failure?

But it seems YouTube wasn’t able to pull it out of the bag this time around, either. A quick glimpse at the video’s ratings on YouTube reveals that it’s had an astounding 173,000 dislikes, versus the 120,000 likes it’s amassed in the short time it has been live. Suffice it to say, it’s on a downward trajectory.

At this stage, maybe should just put the vote to its users — a bit like we do with our Readers’ Choice Awards. Sure, people would still disagree with the decisions, but it would ultimately remove YouTube itself from the crosshairs of diehard fans claiming it doesn’t understand what its customers want.

The smart thing to do would be to extract all the data, then create a poll of the top five videos for each section, putting the final choice to the voters. Or maybe even eliminating the statistics altogether and including a voting button next to each video, adding up the ballots at the end of the year.

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