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Watching The

Pandemic

What YouTube trends reveal about human needs during COVID-19

As 2020 began, chances are that you were not spending a lot of time thinking about slow-fermented bread. But by the end of March, one could make a legitimate case that a good portion of the world was simultaneously fixated on how to achieve a superlative sourdough starter. And the evidence for that was on YouTube.

Not as obvious, at first, was how the trend of sourdough-bread videos related to any of the dozens of other creation and viewership trends we watched unfold throughout the spring after the novel coronavirus pandemic began.

But as time passed and we looked at more data -- following hundreds of leads across scores of categories and countries encompassing millions of videos with billions of total views -- we began to see those first months of pandemic-related YouTube trends as a bigger story.

What follows is that story: a portrait of human needs being broadly met in creative new ways. Both the needs and the ways users addressed them fell into a clear set of themes that we identified with a little cultural anthropological framing. It sounds complex, but as you’ll literally see below, our story is visible to the naked eye through the plots of YouTube data.

Global Viewership

 By the mid-March date of widespread shutdowns and quarantines, global viewership of YouTube in general started to increase and, with it, views of videos related to the aforementioned sourdough.

Widening our scope from sourdough to cooking, using that same demarcation line (which we’ve pegged to the date the US declared a national emergency) we could measure the same kinds of behavior happening in a lot of different places globally at the same time. That’s highly unusual. From Argentina to Australia to the United Arab Emirates, people were watching more videos related to making meals at home.

While it might seem fairly obvious that people stuck indoors would cook more, other, quirkier kinds of trends had the same unprecedented synchronization across the globe. That sent us in search of a framework that might help explain them all collectively.

The Human Needs Model

Susan Kresnicka is a cultural anthropologist who has done extensive work on human needs. She has developed a model, The KR&I Human Needs Model, (right) that identifies three pillars of need, all interconnected, as the diagram suggests, in one way or another:  Self Care, Social Connection, and Identity. The overlaps address the fact that in satisfying one’s need for social connection, for example, one might also be reaffirming an aspect of one’s identity.

With Kresnicka’s model in hand, we took the dozens of trends we’d been tracking and started to plot them out. In the following sections, we organized those trends by the pillar of need that they seemed to express most prominently.

However, the bucketing of the trends below should not be taken as absolute. For example, while, as you’ll see, we discuss the trend of people making dalgona coffee as part of the section on Social Connection, people also drink coffee as a pick-me-up which means there’s overlap with the Self Care category.

diagram

Self

Care

The regulation of physical, mental, and emotional energy.

The phrase “self care” makes some people think of indulgent candle-lit bubble baths. But it really speaks to the maintenance of our most basic biological and emotional needs. The anxiety and uncertainty triggered by the global pandemic drove people in search of tools to cope: namely videos related to food, exercise, relaxation and even sleep.

selfcare

Explore the increase in viewership trends in countries around the world and tap on any card to see an example video.

* YouTube views are displayed as indexed values, where the lowest number of views in the time span is represented as 0 and the highest is 100

Yoga

With people both physically confined and mentally stressed by social-distancing and self-isolation, the ability of yoga to address both concerns lead to a doubling of daily views of exercise videos with “yoga” in the title.

self care

Tap to see an example

Yoga

in 'US'

Yoga With Adriene’s video for beginners, published in 2013, has gained over 5 million views since March 15.

Tap to return to global overview

Guided Meditation

Guided meditation, like yoga, is a mindfulness exercise that can be used to regulate all types of energy. This year, average daily views of videos related to guided meditation increased over 40% after March 15.

self care

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Guided Meditation

in 'US'

Deepak Chopra is one of many creators who developed specific guided meditations to address pandemic-related stress. Chopra’s channel, Chopra Well, has increased its total subscribers by over 40% this year.

Tap to return to global overview

Nature Sounds

With stress comes disruption of sleep patterns, which in turn leads to increases in views of videos related to getting rest. Among these were videos featuring nature sounds videos, often positioned as a way to help ease viewers into sleep.

self care

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Nature Sounds

in 'US'

This combination of nature sounds and soothing music from Dream Sounds has been viewed over 2 million times since March 15.

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Home Workouts

As gyms shut down widely, viewers used home workout videos to maintain their physical fitness. Daily views of exercise videos with "no equipment" or "home" in the title quadrupled after our demarcation date.

self care & identity

Tap to see an example

Home Workouts

in 'GB'

Body Coach TV’s Joe Wicks was a breakout star of home workout YouTube. His family-friendly PE With Joe home workouts were weekly top livestreams in the U.K.

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Restaurant Style

With many dining establishments off limits, videos instructing viewers in creating restaurant-style cuisine gained popularity. As with other comfort foods, cooking and eating these foods is as much about the feeling they provide as the nutritional value.

self care

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Restaurant Style

in 'IN'

India was a strong locus of this trend, and this video from CookingShooking shows how emulating restaurant cuisine allows people to feel the luxury of dining out without leaving home.

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Identity

Our idea and experience of ourselves.

From the most superficial level to the most profound , people sought to reaffirm and redefine themselves as the pandemic disrupted plans, jobs, and the myriad things that play a role in self-perception. Video proved to be a unique way people could both express who they were and who they might become -- say, by learning a new skill.

identity

Explore the increase in viewership trends in countries around the world and tap on any card to see an example video.

* YouTube views are displayed as indexed values, where the lowest number of views in the time span is represented as 0 and the highest is 100

Cooking

Picking up new skills in the kitchen is one of the most accessible ways a person can grow their idea of who they are and what they are capable of, and people flocked to tutorials on YouTube while restaurants were shut down.

self care & identity

Tap to see an example

Cooking

in 'GB'

Gordon Ramsay’s tutorial for beginning cooks has been viewed over 1 million times since March 15.

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Gardening

Another skill set rich with self-preservational meaning, gardening saw increased attention as many people sought out instruction on how to green their thumbs. A specific emphasis on container gardening for people with limited space was an interesting variation during quarantine.

self care & identity

Tap to see an example

Gardening

in 'JP'

This video from Japan showing the cultivation of a radish in a bottle illustrates the kind of “container gardening” videos being viewed around the world this year.

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How To Cut Hair

Deprived of the professionals who tended to this previously, people turned to YouTube in droves to learn how to cut hair. The trend suggested that people valued their appearance and hoped to restore some semblance of familiarity to the way they presented themselves to the world.

identity

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How To Cut Hair

in 'US'

Brad Mondo’s haircutting tutorial has been viewed over 1.5 million times. Views of haircutting tutorials peaked for the year in April.

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Religious Services

As large group gatherings were banned, religious services moved online, and weekly religious ceremonies (like religious masses, as in the chart below) saw an increase in viewership. The trend makes plain how core religion is to people’s identity.

identity

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Religious Services

in 'IT'

The Pope’s late-March recitation of the “Urbi et Orbi”, as the pandemic surged, was a cultural moment that led to the largest single-day subscriber growth for the Vatican’s YouTube channels.

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Video Call Beauty Tips

Shaping how others perceive us is also key to identity. As many people’s social interactions were increasingly mediated through video calls, the need to optimize how they appeared on screen spawned a new type of beauty tutorial: those tailored to video calls.

identity

Tap to see an example

Video Call Beauty Tips

in 'US'

With over 3 million views, HotandFlashy’s video is among the most-viewed beauty tutorials uploaded this year.

Tap to return to global overview

The global pandemic is not over. But, its shocking onset allowed us to see an astonishing uniformity in content trends around the world. That uniformity helped demonstrate the reality of our shared needs: to experience a sense of connection, feel as good as possible, and project a strong sense of self.

That we, acting as isolated individuals, watched the same kinds of videos as others halfway around the globe to meet those needs supports an argument the pandemic continues to make repeatedly and often tragically: no matter how different we are, we’re all human.

Put another way: We watch the same because we are the same.

All graphs were calculated using in-country views of aggregated videos, which were grouped based on metadata including titles and internal categorization. For example, views “cooking” videos as indicated above are videos categorized as “recipe” or “cooking.” The date range for all views data is February 1, 2020, through May 1, 2020, Pacific Time.