Finding your niche
Starting Your YouTube Channel
The single most consequential decision you'll make about your channel isn't your equipment, your editing style, or your upload schedule. It's what your channel is about and who it's for. Get this right and almost everything else becomes easier. Get it wrong and you'll spend months making content that fails to find an audience — not because the videos are bad, but because you're fishing in the wrong pond, or fishing in a pond so crowded there's nothing left to catch.
The Overlap That Actually Works
Niche selection isn't about finding what you're passionate about OR what people want to watch. It's about finding the overlap between the two — and then checking whether that overlap is commercially viable.
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Pure passion channels — "I'll make videos about whatever I feel like" — rarely build audiences because the algorithm can't categorise you and viewers don't know what to expect. Pure demand channels — "I'll make whatever gets views" — burn creators out because there's no genuine interest sustaining the work when views are low. The overlap is where channels actually survive long enough to grow.
Broad vs Narrow — The Spectrum
One of the most common mistakes is starting too broad. "Technology" is not a niche. "Budget smartphones under £300" is. The narrower your niche, the easier it is for YouTube to identify your audience and the easier it is for viewers to decide whether your channel is for them. You can always broaden later once you have an audience — narrowing after the fact is much harder.
- Budget mechanical keyboards under £100
- Sourdough bread for beginners
- PC gaming on a £500 build
- Learning Japanese for anime fans
- Raspberry Pi home server projects
- Mechanical keyboards
- Home baking & bread
- Budget PC gaming
- Learning Japanese
- Raspberry Pi projects
- Tech reviews
- Cooking
- Gaming
- Language learning
- DIY & electronics
Evaluating a Niche Before You Commit
Before you settle on a niche, run it through these four filters. You don't need to pass all four perfectly — but if a niche fails multiple filters, reconsider.
| Filter | What to check | Good sign | Warning sign |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sustained demand | Do people search for this topic consistently, or only around events/trends? | Evergreen — "how to change a tyre" gets searched every day | Trend-dependent — searches spike around one product launch then die |
| Competition level | Search your niche on YouTube. Who's there? How big are they? Is there a gap? | Some competition — proves demand; you can differentiate | Zero OR mega channels only — either no audience or no air to breathe |
| Content volume | Can you make 50–100 videos in this niche without running dry? | Deep catalogue potential — many angles, sub-topics, formats | Thin topic — you'll cover it in 10 videos and have nothing left |
| Monetisation viability | Do advertisers spend money in this space? Are there products to recommend? | High-value audience — finance, tech, B2B, health, education | Low RPM niches — entertainment, vlogs, memes earn far less per 1,000 views |
Assessing Competition — What You're Actually Looking For
Competition in a niche is not a reason to avoid it — it's evidence that an audience exists. What you're looking for is not an empty niche but a gap within a populated one. Search your niche on YouTube and ask:
Passion, Knowledge, and the Sustainability Test
Passion alone is overrated as a niche criterion. What matters more is sustained interest — can you talk about this topic for three years, including during months when your videos get 200 views each? A better test than "am I passionate about this?" is:
- Do you already consume content in this space without being paid to?
- Do you have opinions, experience, or a perspective that differs from what's already out there?
- Could you write 40 video titles in this niche right now without struggling?
- When something happens in this space, are you the first to notice and want to discuss it?
If yes to most of these, you have the raw material. Knowledge matters as much as passion — you don't need to be the world's greatest expert, but you should be able to explain things clearly and give a viewer something they couldn't easily get elsewhere.
Niche vs Format — Two Different Decisions
Your niche (what you cover) and your format (how you cover it) are separate choices, and both matter. A niche can support many formats — tutorials, reviews, essays, vlogs, reaction videos, comparisons, interviews. Choosing a format that plays to your natural strengths makes the content feel easier to produce and more authentic to watch.
- On-camera presenter — comfortable talking directly to camera; works well for tutorials, commentary, vlogs
- Screen recorder — works for software, gaming, coding, any topic where the screen is the content
- Voiceover + footage — for creators who don't want to be on camera; works for documentary-style and educational content
- Faceless / AI-assisted — covered in depth in Course 2, chapters 9–10; viable but has specific constraints
A Practical Exercise Before Moving On
Write down three potential niches you're genuinely interested in. For each one:
- Search it on YouTube — note the top 5 channels and their subscriber counts and last upload dates
- Try to write 20 video title ideas in that niche in 10 minutes
- Check Google Trends for the topic — is interest stable, growing, or declining?
- Ask: who is my ideal viewer for this niche, and what do they get from my channel that they can't get elsewhere?
The niche where this exercise feels easiest and most exciting is usually the right one. The next chapter covers how to research it in depth — using tools like TubeBuddy and VidIQ, analysing what the top videos in your niche are doing right, and reading the signals hidden in comments and analytics.