Built on real collected YouTube data. Opportunity calls are authored and cite their evidence.
What to Make Next
Real data. 1,595 recent uploads from 18 channels and 15,432 public comments, collected 2026-08-27. Quotes are verbatim and unattributed. Opportunity calls are authored and cite their evidence.
Hundreds of measurements across uploads and comments collapse into four signals per subject (demand, momentum, opening and fit). The calls below are a person's reading of those signals, each citing what it was read from.
15,432 comments were pulled from under 255 videos as the top comments per video, our own cap, never a video’s full thread. 13,584 survived screening for spam, non-English text, length and links and were counted; 11,725 of those are clean enough to quote. Competitor supply is counted across the 15 channels in the competitor set, not across YouTube as a whole.
Every subject in the run is scored on the same four. A score is a 0-100 rank among the subjects measured, so 90 means near the top of this run, not 90 percent of anything.
Do people want this?
Mentions in comments, unprompted mentions under videos about something else, outright requests, and where-is-X complaints, counted per subject.
Is interest growing?
The subject's share of uploads and of conversation in the last 14 days against the 60 days before, as a lift.
Is there room to own it?
Demand against competitor supply in the window, and days since WatchMojo last covered the subject.
Can WatchMojo win with it?
WatchMojo's own performance index on the subject, or on its vertical when the subject has too little history of its own.
Each call names its subject, so the meters beside it are read live from the corpus rather than typed in. The order is a person's, and the evidence behind every line is one click away.
Keep the true-crime lane at full volume, but lean into the retrospective frame that is breaking out: lists reread through what has since come out.
Music is the vertical where WatchMojo publishes 85 videos to the competitor set's 28, and its rock and metal lists are the summer's quietest breakouts. Make more of them.
The biggest film event of the winter is already saturated with explainers from four competitors. WatchMojo's evidence says its edge is ranked theories and questions, so own that shape.
Thirteen videos in the anime vertical across the owned channels in three months, four of them among the summer's breakouts. The competitor set published eleven in the same vertical. Double the cadence.
The 'won't cast anymore' list is a proven breakout and the audience is naming who was left out. A numbered sequel, on the public record, is the safest big swing in the corpus.
The top-scoring subject in the run is a MojoPlays lane. 'How is Metroid NES not on this list' is the audience telling you the next one.
Looper's four 'the only explainer you need' videos own the Lanterns run-up. WatchMojo's numbered list on it worked; its question-titled one did not. Do the numbered one again.
A 2,400-view channel is getting 40x to 113x breakouts on old-Hollywood secrets. The subject has an audience with nowhere big to go, and MsMojo's own Old TV Shows list just ran at 3.3x.
The single largest competitor breakout in the window is a Top 10 about AI saying things scientists cannot explain, at 28x its channel median. WatchMojo has not made the list yet.
A D23 reveal turned a quiet franchise into the seventh-highest momentum subject in the run, and the competitor set has not moved on it yet.
The channel's two biggest Westeros lists of the summer ran at 5.8x and 7.9x. Season three ended on 9 August and the conversation is still arriving, so the post-finale reread window is open for a few weeks.
Included as the decay example. WatchMojo's unanswered-questions list ran at 6.3x in the release week; a month later the explainer lane belongs to Looper and the conversation has cooled to a tenth.
30 TV Deaths That Also Killed the Show ran at 6.9x eleven days ago and is still climbing. The retrospective reread of television is a repeatable shape, not a one-off.
The combined score behind each badge is a weighted mix of the four signals; hover a badge for the weights. Calls are ordered by a person’s reading of the whole board, not by that score alone, which is why a lower-scoring subject can sit above a higher one: the measured ranking is further down this page for comparison.
The lane is part of the call. A measured suggestion comes from momentum, velocity and late comment share; the authored call may override it and says why on the opportunity page.
Hot conversation and rising uploads. Publish into the spike.
Rising, with less heat. Ship while the request is still standing.
Waiting for its next beat: a trailer, a release, an episode.
Still drawing comments a month after upload. Slot it any week.
Fit has a negative side. These are measured on the main channel's own uploads in the window; the sentence is the authored part.
Every one of the ten worst-performing main-channel uploads in the window is a versus debate or a Feedback Friday episode, at 0.14x to 0.21x the median. Christopher Nolan vs Denis Villeneuve, Netflix vs Disney Plus vs Apple TV, Insidious vs The Conjuring: the subjects are fine, the shape is not.
Titles numbered 20 or more run at 2.5x the channel median; titles numbered 10 run at 0.86x. Of the summer's twenty biggest breakouts, fourteen carried a 20, 30, 45, 50, 75 or 100.
Titles ending in a question mark run at 0.19x; titles with a colon, dash or pipe break at 0.21x; titles with no number at all at 0.25x. These are the shapes competitors use for explainers, and on competitor channels they index near 1.0. On this channel they are read as not-a-list.
Explainer-format titles index at 0.54x on WatchMojo and 0.99x on the competitor set; 'explained' in a title runs at 0.59x here and 1.45x there. Looper's five Brand New Day explainers all ran above 7x. Meet them with a list, not an explainer.
The top 12 subjects by combined score, straight out of the corpus, with a floor of evidence so a subject with two videos and one comment cannot top it.
| # | Subject | Vertical | Score | Signals, 0-100 rank in run | Last covered by WatchMojo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Child stars8 videos, 35 mentions | Celebrity | 84 | Demand82Demand 82 out of 100 Momentum88Momentum 88 out of 100 Opening78Opening 78 out of 100 Fit90Fit 90 out of 100 | 2026-08-1710d ago |
| 02 | Retro gaming29 videos, 88 mentions | Video games | 83 | Demand94Demand 94 out of 100 Momentum85Momentum 85 out of 100 Opening84Opening 84 out of 100 Fit62Fit 62 out of 100 | 2026-08-1017d ago |
| 03 | Nintendo35 videos, 49 mentions | Video games | 78 | Demand89Demand 89 out of 100 Momentum86Momentum 86 out of 100 Opening81Opening 81 out of 100 Fit50Fit 50 out of 100 | 2026-08-1512d ago |
| 04 | Sonic (games)15 videos, 81 mentions | Video games | 77 | Demand90Demand 90 out of 100 Momentum77Momentum 77 out of 100 Opening82Opening 82 out of 100 Fit53Fit 53 out of 100 | 2026-08-0126d ago |
| 05 | Zombies12 videos, 40 mentions | Film | 77 | Demand82Demand 82 out of 100 Momentum85Momentum 85 out of 100 Opening78Opening 78 out of 100 Fit59Fit 59 out of 100 | 2026-08-198d ago |
| 06 | The Legend of Zelda19 videos, 40 mentions | Video games | 74 | Demand80Demand 80 out of 100 Momentum80Momentum 80 out of 100 Opening82Opening 82 out of 100 Fit45Fit 45 out of 100 | 2026-06-2365d ago |
| 07 | Kingdom Hearts15 videos, 46 mentions | Video games | 74 | Demand71Demand 71 out of 100 Momentum91Momentum 91 out of 100 Opening72Opening 72 out of 100 Fit61Fit 61 out of 100 | 2026-08-189d ago |
| 08 | Diddy trial3 videos, 11 mentions | Celebrity | 74 | Demand67Demand 67 out of 100 Momentum89Momentum 89 out of 100 Opening62Opening 62 out of 100 Fit80Fit 80 out of 100 | 2026-08-252d ago |
| 09 | Movie soundtracks / scores8 videos, 23 mentions | Film | 72 | Demand84Demand 84 out of 100 Momentum84Momentum 84 out of 100 Opening78Opening 78 out of 100 Fit34Fit 34 out of 100 | 2026-08-216d ago |
| 10 | Batman41 videos, 137 mentions | Film | 71 | Demand93Demand 93 out of 100 Momentum77Momentum 77 out of 100 Opening53Opening 53 out of 100 Fit53Fit 53 out of 100 | 2026-08-189d ago |
| 11 | Star Wars29 videos, 55 mentions | Film | 71 | Demand91Demand 91 out of 100 Momentum94Momentum 94 out of 100 Opening49Opening 49 out of 100 Fit40Fit 40 out of 100 | 2026-08-234d ago |
| 12 | The Simpsons12 videos, 26 mentions | TV and streaming | 71 | Demand60Demand 60 out of 100 Momentum93Momentum 93 out of 100 Opening66Opening 66 out of 100 Fit64Fit 64 out of 100 | 2026-08-198d ago |
This is the raw ranking: every score is a 0-100 rank among the 262 subjects in this run, and the board above is the authored reading of it. The two disagree on purpose. A subject can score high here on a spike under one video and still not earn a slot, and a call above can rest on views the comment sample under-represents. “Last covered” is the main channel’s most recent upload on the subject inside its 2026-05-25 to 2026-08-27 window; “not in window” means none in that span, not never.
Everything on this screen comes from a single collection run on 2026-08-27, so there is no earlier run to compare against and no trend line is claimed. Signal scores are percentile-style ranks across the 262 subjects measured, never absolute claims about YouTube. Counts, indexes and signals are measured; the board, the timing lanes and the stop signals are authored, and each cites the comment and video ids it was read from. Quotes anywhere in the portal are verbatim and unattributed. YouTube is the only platform in the run, no thumbnails were analysed, and competitor supply means the 15 channels in the set.
Step 1 of 7
The decision screen. Hundreds of data points collapse into four signals per subject, DEMAND, MOMENTUM, OPENING and FIT, and from those a ranked answer to the only question the editorial team actually has: what should WatchMojo make next.