How Niche Should Your YouTube Channel Be?

Your YouTube channel should stay as broad as possible on the topic (basketball, geography, fitness) without going too broad, and the video format you pick should do the niching down for you. I don't deliberately go out of my way to sub-niche a channel. I pick a bigger niche, find the most viral recent videos in it, and let that format turn the channel into something like a "top 10 NBA players" channel or a "geography facts" channel. If you go too specific, like one team or one state, you're just going to make a lot less money.

The Short Answer: Stay Broad and Let the Format Do It

This one came from a comment on a previous video. The question was: when picking the niche and doing ideation, should the ideas be in a sub-niche and not too broad, so that YouTube pushes your videos out to the right audience?

My answer is that your ideation will naturally push you into a sub-niche. You definitely want to stay as broad as possible when it comes to your topic, without going too broad. Then your format dictates your sub-niche.

Here is what that looks like in the three examples I used.

Basketball: a Top 10 Channel, Not a Celtics Channel

I like using basketball as the example. Say you have a basketball YouTube channel. Basketball is your niche.

What's naturally going to happen next is you pick a format, meaning a title structure or a video idea structure for the channel.

So go copy something from a channel that's really crushing it. In the video I pulled up Nonstop Sports. One of their top content strategies is listicle style videos, like "top 10 tallest players in NBA history." It's an older video, but it's a pretty good emulation video.

If that's your emulation video, my rule from the other videos applies. You pick one format for your videos. You become a "top 10 [blank] in the NBA" channel, and that is your entire video series, over and over again.

So the channel does niche down, into a top 10 channel. It just doesn't niche down so tight that it's only a small group of people.

Too tight looks like this:

• College basketball from 2001 to 2010. That's such a specific era.
• A basketball channel talking specifically about the Boston Celtics. That's way too specific of a niche.

Don't go that specific. Use the format of the channel as the controller of what you talk about. If formats are new to you, I explain them with my own numbers in how to make $30K a month with a faceless YouTube channel.

Geography: Always Ask What the Broadest Version Is

Geography is an easy one for me. There are a lot of different ways you can niche down in it. US geography, global geography, all of these.

You always have to ask yourself what the highest, broadest way of doing it is.

• Global geography or geopolitics is always going to be the biggest group of people.
• US geography, or one specific continent, is a great secondary way of doing it.
• Texas geography is too far down.

If you purely did Texas geography, maybe you could make a couple thousand dollars a month off a channel like that. It's just going to be way too specific.

So what do we do instead? On a lot of my videos the title is "50 [blank] geography facts." What naturally happens is that becomes the sub-niche. We're now a geography facts channel. The title structure and the format sub-niched it for us.

Fitness: One Title Structure, Repeated

Another good example is the "what happens to your body if" format. There are channels whose entire strategy is to do these videos over and over again, and it looks like a lot of other channels have jumped on it over the years.

The one I pulled up in the video keeps doing the same thing:

• What actually happens if you do 50 push-ups every day
• What happens if you dead hang every day
• What happens if you plank every single day

They basically turned it into a copy and paste template, and that became the format. You're a fitness channel, but around what happens when you do something every single day.

The 3-Step Process I Use

If I were to rephrase the whole thing as a process, it's this:

1. Pick a niche. A big, broad one. I walk through how in how to pick a faceless YouTube niche.
2. Find the most viral videos in that niche. Preferably ones that are more recent.
3. Let those viral video formats sub-niche the channel.

That's how I become the geography facts channel, or the top 10 NBA player channel where I talk about all the different types of NBA players.

What Happens If You Go Too Specific

You don't deliberately go out of your way to sub-niche. The format does it.

It's going to be more difficult to make money, and you're going to really struggle to get the results you're wanting.

If you haven't chosen the broad niche yet, my tier list of faceless YouTube niches ranks the ones I get asked about the most.

Video Chapters

• 0:00Intro
• 0:31The question: sub-niche or stay broad?
• 1:03Basketball as the example niche
• 1:33Picking a format from a winning channel
• 2:35Becoming a "top 10" channel
• 3:06What too specific looks like
• 3:37Geography example
• 4:39"50 geography facts" as the sub-niche
• 5:10The process: niche, viral videos, format
• 5:41The "what happens to your body" format
• 7:15Recap: how to sub-niche a channel

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