How Much Do We Love 'Love' Songs?

You may have heard that "Love" is one of the most common words in song titles, and it's true that many of Billboard's top charting songs include the word. But what about in the world of web video?

On YouTube, there are well approximately 5 million music videos with the word "love" in the title and those videos have been watched over a whopping 50 BILLION times. The most popular of them is Eminem and Rihanna's "Love the Way You Lie", which has over 600 million views to date.

Below you'll find a chart of when these "love" music videos were posted over the history of the site. With the exception of one anomaly in 2008, the majority of peaks are right around Valentine's Day when we see an uptick in "love"-related uploads.



Here are the top 10 "love" music videos on YouTube of all-time:

1. Love the Way You Lie - Eminem ft. Rihanna
2. International Love - Pitbull ft. Chris Brown
3. We Found Love - Rihanna ft. Calvin Harris
4. Somebody to Love Remix - Justin Bieber ft. Usher
5. Love You Like a Love Song - Selena Gomez and The Scene
6. Stereo Love - Edward Maya and Vika Jigulina
7. As Long As You Love Me - Justin Bieber ft. Big Sean
8. This is Love - will.i.am and Eva Simons
9. Love Story - Taylor Swift
10. Love Me - Justin Bieber

Watch them all below:



Or, instead of watching those, here's a cover video that mashes up over 25 different love songs in one.

-- Kevin Allocca

Top 10 Holiday Videos of 2013

Happy Holidays from YouTube Trends!

It's time for our annual review of the top trending videos of the holiday season. This year, we've got more videos produced by brands than ever before, with five total, if you include the NBA which is on the list for the second year in a row. The top spot went to WestJet's popular Christmas vid and rounding out the 10 was last year's champion, Epic Rap Battles of History.

You can see the full top 10 in the list below or via this playlist.

The top vid of the Christmas week so far comes from Steve Kardynal (who also produced one of 2013's top trending videos overall). The #1 Hanukkah video of the year comes from The Maccabeats

For more, you can check out the top 10 lists from 2012, 2011, and 2010.

-- Kevin Allocca & Bonnie Gleicher

Data Behind the 2013 YouTube Music Awards Nominees

The first-ever YouTube Music Awards are live this Sunday evening at 6pmET and to celebrate, we did a little digging into the data behind some of the 2013 nominees, all of which were selected based on a series of viewership, subscriber, and/or engagement metrics. (To get all the details on the nominees read this or check out the YouTube Spotlight channel where you can also vote for the winners.)

Video of the year is one of the categories drawing the most interest, and that's not really a surprise when you consider the 1.9 billion views these videos currently have combined. That's an average of over half a million views for every second of video.

Here is daily viewership data (though, please note that we have cut off the initial "Gentleman" spike, which at a record 38 million views in a single day made this chart hilariously unreadable):



The ten nominees for Artist of the Year drew nearly 10 billion views combined on their official videos between October 2012 and the start of this month. They also saw large numbers of new subscribers to those channels. And while many of the artists reside in the United States, when you look at likes, shares, and other types of fan activity, over 75% of the combined engagement top artists saw was from outside the U.S.

Here you can see their weekly growth in subscribers and the impact new video releases from Rihanna and PSY had on their channels:



While the data determined the nominees, the winners will be decided by fans whose sharing activity this week and last will be tallied right up to Sunday night's show.

For the expert trend trackers, see if you can guess what keyword this graph of YouTube search data represents... (hint: it's the top spiking "music"-related search of 2013)



Click to find the answer.

-- Kevin Allocca

Top 5 Educational Blockbusters of the Summer

Summer's over, school is back, and students are in the classroom ready to learn again. But did they ever stop? Turns out, people on YouTube spent 15% more time watching educational videos in August 2013 than April. From outrageous science experiments and geographical anecdotes, to lessons on how to become British Royalty or stop an asteroid, people spent over 142 million hours watching educational content on YouTube this summer. That’s nearly 16,200 years of video watched, and more than twice as much as last summer!



And the numbers keep climbing. From 2011 to 2013, views of educational videos during the summer have increased by 99% in the US.



While the views come from a collection of over 46 million videos, we’ve put together a list of the summer’s educational blockbusters and highlighted the top five most-viewed EDU videos of the season. Sure beats summer school, right?

Video		Channel	Total Summer Views
	How Old Are Your Ears? (Hearing Test)	AsapSCIENCE	5,416,659
	Why Are Things Creepy?	Vsauce	4,560,119
	Self Freezing Coca-Cola	Grant Thompson	4,458,311
	Amazing Resonance Experiment!	brusspup	3,416,145
	Canada & The United States: Bizarre Borders	CGPGrey	3,277,612

*View counts based on totals as of August 31, 2013

Even if you’re back in class, it’s not too late to catch up on the summer’s hits. Check out our top five playlist, and good luck this year.



-- Dan Abel