What to make a video aboutTrending topics in South Africa today

Two free, official sources. The searches are Google Trends' public "trending now" feed for South Africa (geo ZA): the search, Google's approximate volume, and the news stories Google attached to it. The reading list is Wikimedia's public pageview figures for English Wikipedia, the most-read articles over one whole UTC day. The Wikipedia list is worldwide, not South Africa only, so it is the same on every country page.

It is Google's own band, not a count. Google Trends reports search volume in coarse steps — 2,000+, 20,000+, 50,000+ and so on — so a search marked 50,000+ has had at least fifty thousand searches in the period Google measures, and we have no finer figure than that.

Because some of what trends on any day is a death, a disaster or a crime. We list those — leaving them out would misstate what people are actually searching for and reading — but we do not prompt anyone to make a video on someone's tragedy. The check is a plain word list over the topic and its headlines, so it will sometimes hold back a harmless topic too.

Because a language model's knowledge of this week is stale and the story is not. When Google attaches a news story to a search, the button sends that story's link to our URL-to-video tool, which reads the article and writes the script from it. A topic with no story — every Wikipedia one — goes in as an idea for a short explainer instead. Making the video needs a plan, from $7 a month.

The page is rebuilt from both sources at most once an hour. Google's feed moves through the day, so the searches can change between visits. The Wikipedia list is a finished day — usually yesterday, or the day before early in the UTC morning, before Wikimedia publishes yesterday's figures — so it changes once a day.

No. It is Google searches and Wikipedia reading, nothing else. We have no TikTok or Instagram data, and a page implying otherwise would be lying about where the list came from.