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:
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.
Instagram is making its way to yet another screen, and this time, Apple TV is getting a taste of the Reels rabbit hole. The company has launched a dedicated Instagram app for Apple TV, bringing Reels, longer videos, and live shows to the big screen. So, if watching one quick clip on a phone somehow turns into an hour of scrolling, there's now a much larger screen for that.
Instagram brings Reels and more to Apple TV
Audio-Technica, a brand well known for making some of the best studio and professional headphones on the market, has just come out with the ATH-AWX7000, which the company itself claims to be its "finest headphones ever." The new flagship closed-back headphone has debuted at an eye-watering price of $3,799. It combines hand-finished Japanese woodwork with a newly developed 58mm driver.
The earcups are made from Kiso cypress, a prized wood historically used for Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples. Each housing is finished by hand with traditional Echizen lacquer, which brings out the grain and is expected to darken over time. The frame and sliders are finished in a deep navy kachi-iro shade traditionally associated with samurai.
This post is brought to you in paid partnership with Best Buy.
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