A topic can score highly and still be a bad idea to cover. "This is big" and "this still has room" are different claims, so ViceRadar reports them separately.
The score ranks. The status tells you what phase the topic is in.
The six states
NEW — fewer than two observations, so there is no velocity yet. Not a judgement. Every other status is a claim about rate of change, and rate of change needs at least two readings. A topic sitting at NEW is one we have only just started watching.
RISING — views are accumulating at a meaningful rate and not falling. The ordinary healthy state.
BREAKING — sharp acceleration, strong outlier performance, and still few channels on it. The rarest and most valuable state, because all three conditions holding at once usually means a subject has just broken and coverage has not caught up.
HOT — high velocity, but coverage is no longer thin. Real attention, more competition.
SATURATING — supply climbing while demand is flat or falling. The one to respect.
DECLINING — the current rate is well below the earlier rate. Attention has moved on.
Why SATURATING is the useful one
Every trend tool can tell you something is popular. Popularity is visible from view counts alone. What is hard is telling you that a topic is about to stop being worth it — that creators are still piling in while viewers have already lost interest.
Detecting that needs supply and demand tracked as separate time series, which is why every sweep records both the number of videos on a topic and the views those videos are accumulating. When the first keeps climbing and the second flattens, the topic is saturating, regardless of how large the numbers still look.
That is the moment to skip a topic, and it usually arrives while the topic still appears to be doing well.
A bug worth describing
Supply growth was originally measured from the change in how many videos a topic contained. That sounds right and is subtly wrong: a topic also gains videos when our own clustering finally gets to something published days earlier.
While the system worked through a backlog, 143 topics showed their video count jump by more than 30% in a single interval, and 144 came back SATURATING. The label was reporting our ingestion, not the market.
That is the worst possible direction for such a bug. SATURATING tells a creator not to make the video. A false one costs them the opportunity, and costs us their trust in every other number on the page.
Supply growth is now counted from videos actually published in the interval, which is a fact about creators rather than about us.
Using status with score
Read them together:
- BREAKING or RISING with a decent score — the case for acting now.
- High score, SATURATING — big, but you are late. Look for the angle nobody has covered rather than the topic itself.
- Any status, low confidence — treat as a lead to check, not a conclusion.
- UNSCORED — we cannot measure it yet, and the topic page names the missing input.
Status is deliberately not derived from the score. If it were, it would tell you nothing the score had not already told you.