The best faceless YouTube niches I've seen for getting to six figures are sports, spirituality and religion, travel and geography, health and fitness, public records, STEM, celebrity, blue collar, storytelling and recaps. For beginners I point to sports, celebrity and recaps first, because they're the easiest to get into and you can copy what already works. Public records and celebrity can make money the fastest but come with shadowbans and legal risk, and STEM and storytelling are the hardest to produce. When I recorded this I had run upwards of 50 faceless channels, and one of my students had just made around $60,000 in a month in the basketball niche.
- Aim for money first and passion second. If you've never made $10,000 a month, skip the crazy new trends and pick a niche where channels are already getting paid.
- Market saturation is a good thing when people who started a few months ago are making 20 or 30 grand a month. It only becomes a problem when nobody new is getting in.
- Sports is one of my favorite niches for beginners. One student made around $60,000 in a month in basketball, and what works in one sport usually works in another.
- Public records (body cam, courtroom and interrogation footage) is the fastest money on this list and also the niche you're most likely to fail with. I've had students reach $50,000 to $80,000 a month in it.
- Meditation style content pays around a dollar per 1,000 views, against roughly $5 to $12 for the niches in this guide.
- If you upload 20 to 30 videos in a niche and can't find success, pivot to a different one.
- Before You Pick: How I Think About Niches
- The Vocabulary You Need First
- The 10 Niches at a Glance
- The Beginner-Friendly Niches: Sports, Celebrity and Recaps
- The Slow and Steady Niches: Religion, Travel and Health
- The Fast Money Niche: Public Records
- The Hard Ones: STEM, Storytelling and Blue Collar
- How to Choose Between Them
- Video chapters
- FAQ
Before You Pick: How I Think About Niches
When I recorded this I'd been doing YouTube since 2018 and faceless channels since 2019. I had run upwards of 50 faceless channels, I had over 400 students in Faceless Channel Academy, and around 3,000 people had gone through my paid trainings over the years. This list comes from watching that many people jump into these niches.
Every niche has its pros and cons. As Warren Buffett says, risk comes from not knowing what you're doing, and far too often I see people skip this research. So my goal is to give you awareness of what you're getting into.
The rules I'd read before the list:
- Money first, passion second. You'll see people talking about making 100K a month in two months off a new trend. If you've never made $10,000 a month, don't worry about crazy numbers yet. Get to where you're making money, then build around what you're passionate about.
- Sub-niche it. I'm giving you general niches. Don't do a sports channel. Do a basketball channel, and more specifically something like a basketball player biography channel.
- Do what's already working. Don't try to be original on your first channel.
One more thing I've found. Sometimes I just can't figure a niche out. That doesn't mean other people aren't making money with it. If you upload 20 to 30 videos and can't find success, go pivot to a different niche.
For how narrow to go once you've picked, read how niche your YouTube channel should be.
The Vocabulary You Need First
I use these terms all the way through.
| Term | What I mean by it |
|---|---|
| TAM | Total addressable market, the size of the audience. |
| Market sophistication | How high the audience's expectations are. High means they want content they can't find anywhere else. Low means they'll watch pretty much anything you post. |
| Market saturation | More channels doing the same thing. |
| Evergreen vs trending | Evergreen is more secure and slower to make money. Trending is faster and a lot more work. |
| RPM | Revenue per mille, how much you make per 1,000 views. |
| Limited ads | The video stays monetized, but YouTube limits which ads play on it, so you make less. |
| Age gating | People under 18 can't watch the video. |
| Copyright strike | The owner doesn't want their content used at all. Three of those and that's it. |
| Copyright claim | The owner gets the ad revenue from that video. |
Saturation is the one beginners get wrong, and it screws them over. If everybody in a niche is making 20 or 30 grand a month and there are lots of them, that means you can make 20 or 30 grand a month.
What you don't want on your first channel is to be the only person in a new market. Then you have to validate it yourself, and you don't even know what people want to watch. Saturation becomes a real issue when nobody is getting in recently or a lot of new channels are failing.
On evergreen versus trending, I lean evergreen and catch trending luck as it comes. I had a channel about World War II history. Netflix made a documentary on World War II and all of a sudden our evergreen videos were trending. When the trend passed, they were still getting views.
Copyright claims are one of the easier ones. You find the spot that got claimed, edit it out and re-upload. For limited ads and age gating, take out the violence, blood and gore until the video is as close to PG as you can get it. A lot of times that means taking it down and re-uploading, which kills the momentum.
The 10 Niches at a Glance
I cover about 90% of faceless niches here, grouped into 10 categories. The numbers are what I'd seen when I recorded this.
| Niche | Getting in | What I've seen it pay | Main thing to watch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sports | Easy, good for beginners | A student at around $60,000 in a month. I know people at 100 grand a month. | More competition, game footage copyright |
| Spirituality and religion | Easier production, older audience | No seven figure channels in my research | Sensitive subject, low RPM on meditation content |
| Travel and geography | Slow to build, very stable | One of my most stable 20 grand a month channels | Slow growth, sensationalism on political topics |
| Health and fitness | Getting more competitive | 20 grand a month pretty reasonably | Medical claims, fast moving trends |
| Public records | Highest chance of failing | Students at $50,000 to $80,000 a month | Shadowbans on R-rated content |
| STEM | Maximum difficulty | One of the largest view potentials | Production cost, consistency |
| Celebrity | Top five easiest for beginners | People making 300 grand a month during one big trial | Dry spells, staying current, legal letters |
| Blue collar | Hit or miss | A couple of channels at a million dollars a year | Who owns the footage |
| Storytelling | One of the hardest to produce | A ton of money if you can figure it out | Time per video, deadlines |
| Recaps | Good for beginners | Some seven figure channels | Copyright claims, strict publishers |
On RPM, the niches here sit between about $5 to $6 on the low end and $10 to $12 per 1,000 views. More on that in YouTube RPM by niche.
The Beginner-Friendly Niches: Sports, Celebrity and Recaps
Sports
Sports is one of the best niches out there, for beginners and advanced people. It's easy because of parallel niches. If you see "basketball players you won't believe exist" working, you can make the soccer version, the football version, the hockey version and the baseball version.
Make the content for casual fans, and make sure the die-hard fans like it too.
What I've heard from friends in the sports niche making $30,000 to $50,000 a month is that a lot of leagues (the NBA, Formula 1 and especially MMA) now use social media as part of their marketing. So a lot of times they either have no issue with you using their clips, or they extend an offer to partner with you where they take 30 or 40% of the money and you get to use the footage.
Ad revenue is super high here. I have students who started within six months and are already making 50 grand a month. My students in sports also get a lot of brand deals coming their way.
The things to know:
- There's more competition, so if you come up with an idea, someone will probably take it fast. There are also more viewers to go around.
- News needs to go up fairly quickly. An evergreen angle (the day Michael Jordan showed Larry Bird who's boss) is more timeless.
- It slows down in the offseason. Run evergreen content then, and mix in more trending content during the season.
My pro tip is do not mix sports. One channel, one sport. Then sub-niche it down again to documentaries, news, recaps or top moments.
Celebrity
This is one of the easiest niches to get into, probably top five for beginners. There's always somebody in the news for misbehaving, and there are always new big budget movies coming out whose trends you can ride.
When something is happening, market sophistication is extremely low. People want anything and everything about it. I have friends who made a couple hundred grand in a month off the Drake and Kendrick Lamar rap drama. When the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard case was going on, there were people making 300 grand a month.
The cons are real though. There's a good amount of dry time between news cycles. You have to watch the industry closely and stay up to date. And there's legal risk, like defamation cases and cease and desist letters.
I personally don't like drama. But if you're just trying to make money first, go do this, then build something you're passionate about. I'd do it for a couple of years and move on.
Recaps
Recaps cover TV shows, cartoons, Marvel, anime, and movies you've never heard of in your life. People watch a 20 minute summary instead of spending two hours on a movie or a week on a show. Super fans come for the theories and deeper analysis. You get both audiences.
A lot of my students fit this niche because they're more introverted and they already like watching movies or anime.
What I like is the consistency. Once people get going, the floor of their views is often 100,000 views a video. There are some seven figure channels here too. Anime alone has something like 30 or 40 channels, which is a highly saturated market, but you can make a lot of money pretty quickly with it.
What to watch:
- You'll face more copyright claims, so you have to edit around them.
- You may get shadowbanned if you go the edgier route.
- Some Japanese and Korean publishers are aggressive about copyright and will just tell YouTube to take your channel down.
So see which shows other channels cover and stay close to those. If nobody covers a show, there's probably a reason.
The Slow and Steady Niches: Religion, Travel and Health
These three lean toward an older audience. The perk is that older viewers don't have the same dopamine brained expectations, so you don't have to be as crazy with the edits. The downside is they're a little hesitant to watch a new channel. It takes a while to grow, but once you get going the views are really consistent.
Spirituality and religion
This has been more of a trend since the pandemic, and you can apply it to literally any religion. Explanations of religious texts and teachings, motivational content, and stories of personal spiritual experiences all work.
Stay away from guided meditations and mindfulness videos. They get replayed a lot, but you'll probably be around a dollar RPM.
On the ceiling, I don't know too many people making 100 grand a month with religious channels. I have a research page of around 300 six figure faceless channels and another 50 or so at seven figures, and I did not see any seven figure religious channels. It's a moderate ad revenue niche unless you build a full business behind it, like courses or a paid community.
It's a sensitive subject with varied beliefs, so there's potential for controversy. And it depends how you feel about monetizing religion. I feel a little bit weird about it personally.
Travel and geography
Places, cultures, geography and geopolitics. It's more evergreen, so it takes longer to get into, but once it's making money it's super stable. One of my travel channels is one of the most stable 20 grand a month channels I have.
From talking to fans, it's typically 30 and 40 year olds who play the videos on their television.
Content that works: travel guides for specific destinations, cultural insights and local traditions, breakdowns of political events, and geography facts. If you do political content, be wary of sensationalizing it. That's the YouTube policy issue in this niche.
We get a lot of brand deal offers here, and they're all over the place (even real estate). I also see more travel channels sell merch than in other niches. There are one or two channels making a million dollars a year with this.
Health and fitness
This has been one of my favorites to send people into, and it's getting competitive. A year or two before I recorded this, you could get millions of views with what was basically a slideshow presentation. You see less of that now.
There are always new trends, and the topics and keywords change often. I see a lot of older channels fall off because they don't stay with the trends.
What does well:
- How-to videos on home exercise and workouts
- Explainers on common and rare medical conditions
- Nutritional advice, recipes and diet plans
- Interviews with health professionals, which are killing it because of the lack of trust people have right now
The big con is compliance. You can't say you can cure cancer. You can't even say reverse. You have a responsibility to give accurate and safe information.
You can make 20 grand a month pretty reasonably. I don't know many seven figure health channels on ad revenue alone. You're also competing with doctors who have a full business and don't need the views.
Finance is the worst faceless niche to get into, for that same reason. There are finance people who only need 100,000 views a month because the business behind the channel is making a million dollars a month. They don't care about the views, which makes them hard to compete with. Some people do make it work.
The Fast Money Niche: Public Records
Public records means body cam footage, courtroom proceedings and interrogation rooms.
If you want the fast money niche on this list, this is it. I've had a lot of students get to $50,000 to $80,000 a month with it. You also have the highest likelihood of failing with this one.
The upside, in my experience, is you don't run into the copyright issues the other niches have, because the footage is public record. (That's how I see it as an operator. It isn't legal advice.)
The pain is shadowbans. You can upload the best video out there and get 10 views, because it's highly likely to be R-rated content, and YouTube is not going to tell a new channel what counts as R-rated. You have to figure that out yourself. Bigger channels get away with more than smaller channels. It's a pain of a niche to get into, but the people who figure it out can make a ton of money really quickly.
I feel weird about doing it myself. If this niche had been out there when I first got started, I probably would have done it.
The Hard Ones: STEM, Storytelling and Blue Collar
STEM
Science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It's one of my favorite niches to watch and one of the hardest to execute. Market sophistication is at the maximum.
And they want fancy animations a lot of times. There's a huge gap between the high production channels making a ton of money and the low production channels that struggle. Kurzgesagt, one of the coolest channels out there, probably spends $20,000 to $30,000 to produce each video (my estimate). Other channels in the niche are maybe $500 to $1,000 a video. Compare that to sports, where I have students getting away with $30 videos.
Solo creators will get a million views on one video and then struggle to get another out, because it took something like 100 hours. If you want good money you need consistent output.
Niche it down to something like architecture, engineering or mega projects.
Storytelling
This is the coolest category on the list, and the people who run these channels are story geniuses. I'd call it an art form. It can be anything from video games and movies to philosophical concepts, business stories and investigations.
The problem is time. These videos take a very long time to make. If you struggle with discipline and hitting deadlines, it's probably not the niche for you. I struggle with this one and have to put in a lot of extra work to understand it.
Blue collar
Manual labor, construction, manufacturing, agriculture, trucking and heavy machinery. I spent about three hours just pulling channels for this and it was a black hole. There were brand new videos getting millions of views, and I found at least 20 farming and heavy machinery channels making bank.
Day in the life videos do really well, because this work is foreign to a large part of the population.
The concern is footage. I saw a lot of channels that started a year earlier and had stopped uploading, and a lot of that is copyright. Unlike public records, you have to get the rights. Some people reach out to manufacturers and pay them $20 to record some videos, and then they own that content.
Some of my students figured this niche out and some could not. It's the same with the animal niche, which I left off this list because I can never figure it out.
How to Choose Between Them
Some niches work with a logical brain and some work with an emotional brain. IQ people struggle on EQ channels, and EQ people struggle on IQ channels.
Sports is more logical. Spirituality, public records and storytelling are more emotional. Travel and geography sits about in the middle.
I went to school for computer science, so I resonated with logical content first. If you're more of a storyteller, the emotional niches might come easier. The better you understand yourself, the better you'll pick.
To research any of these, create a new YouTube channel, subscribe to a few channels in the niche and watch a few of the videos. You'll see 20 or so more pop up pretty quickly.
This is not a complete list. I skipped some niches that might be great. My shorter ranking is in the tier list of faceless YouTube niches, and the research process is in how to pick a faceless YouTube niche.
Video Chapters
- 0:00Introduction to niches
- 1:20How I approach picking a niche
- 4:54Core vocabulary: TAM, sophistication, saturation
- 11:57Niche selection advice
- 13:34Sports
- 22:23Spirituality and religion
- 29:34Travel and geography
- 33:59Health and fitness
- 40:28Public records
- 46:16STEM
- 52:51Celebrity
- 56:55Blue collar
- 1:03:31Storytelling
- 1:08:50Recaps
FAQ
What is the best faceless YouTube niche for beginners?
Devon Canup points beginners to sports first, then celebrity and recaps, because they are the easiest to get into and proven ideas carry over from one channel to the next. One of his students made around $60,000 in a month in the basketball niche.
Which faceless YouTube niche makes money the fastest?
Devon calls public records (body cam, courtroom and interrogation footage) the fastest money on his list, with students reaching $50,000 to $80,000 a month. He also says it has the highest likelihood of failing, because new channels often get shadowbanned on R-rated content.
Is a saturated niche bad for a faceless YouTube channel?
Not by itself. Devon says that if lots of channels are making 20 or 30 grand a month and some of them started a few months ago, that shows there is money to be made. Saturation is a problem when nobody new is getting in or many new channels are failing.
What RPM do faceless YouTube niches pay?
When Devon recorded this guide, the niches he covered paid roughly $5 to $6 on the low end and $10 to $12 per 1,000 views. Meditation and mindfulness content was around a dollar per 1,000 views, which is why he advises against it.
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