Your niche is your destiny. Pick a $3 CPM niche and you'll need 3 million views a month to make $10K. Pick a $25 CPM niche and you need 400,000. Same effort, 7x different outcome. So I score every niche on four things before I start a channel: CPM potential (40% of the decision), competition (25%), whether I can keep making videos in it within my budget (20%), and whether the videos still get views in 12 months (15%). Then I run one check that overrides the scorecard: is there a channel in that niche, started in the last 6 to 12 months, already making $10K to $30K a month? If there is, I copy what it's doing. If there isn't, I don't care how good the niche looks on paper.
- Money first, passion second. If you've never made 10K a month on YouTube, pick something you're somewhat interested in that's already paying, get to where you're making money, then build around what you love.
- The CPM tier sets the ceiling, but views beat rate. A channel doing everything-and-anything content at about a $3 RPM can still make about $200,000 a month, because it gets the views.
- Competition is a good sign. Market saturation just means more channels are doing the thing. If lots of channels started 3 months ago and are making 20 or 30 grand a month, that means you can too.
- Budget decides the niche more than taste. At $50 or less a video there aren't many channel ideas you can go after. At $200 to $300 a video you can make really good content.
- Stay broad and let the format do the niching. A basketball channel becomes a "top 10 blank in the NBA" channel. A channel about only the Boston Celtics caps out at a couple thousand dollars a month.
- Give a niche 20 to 30 videos. If you can't find success by then, pivot to another one on the list.
- How I Score a Niche: The Four Criteria
- 1. CPM Potential (40%): What's the Financial Cap?
- 2. Competition (25%): Is Anyone Winning Right Now?
- 3. Content Supply (20%): Can You Keep Making Videos Within Your Budget?
- 4. Evergreen Potential (15%): Will It Still Pay in 5 to 10 Years?
- Niches I'd Start Today
- Niches I'd Avoid
- The 4-Step Research Process
- Video chapters
- FAQ
How I Score a Niche: The Four Criteria
This page has always used four criteria with weights. Here's the same scorecard, with the question I actually ask myself under each one. They come from having owned and managed over 40 channels when I recorded the $100K niches video, and upwards of 50 by the time I made my full niche guide.
| Criterion | Weight | The question I actually ask | Where I check |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPM potential | 40% | What's the financial cap? Is the biggest channel in the niche making $5,000 a month, $10,000, $100,000, or a million dollars a month? | Social Blade or vidIQ for views, then my own RPM math |
| Competition | 25% | Has someone else had success with this, and has anyone gone viral in it within the last six months? | A fresh research channel, searching the niche's top keywords |
| Content supply | 20% | How hard are these videos to make, and is that within my budget? Does it fit a script, a voiceover and an edit? | Watch the top channel's videos and ask an editor how long they take |
| Evergreen potential | 15% | Is this profitable for the next 5 to 10 years, or is it a quick cash grab? | The oldest videos in the niche: are they still getting views? |
Want to skip the manual scoring? Our free Niche Evaluator runs your top picks through all four criteria in 7 questions. It takes under 2 minutes.
One thing before the criteria. If you haven't made $10,000 a month yet, don't worry about doing crazy numbers. Pick something you're somewhat interested in, get to where you're making money, and then you can pivot to the passion project from stable ground.
1. CPM Potential (40%): What's the Financial Cap?
CPM is how much advertisers pay per 1,000 views, and the niche sets it before you upload anything. Check Social Blade and ask in YouTube creator communities for real numbers. Don't trust what random blogs say.
| Tier | Niches | What this page has always put them at |
|---|---|---|
| $20 and up | Finance, investing, real estate, business, insurance | Highest CPMs, most competitive |
| $12 to $20 | Tech, health, education, legal | Solid rates, real competition |
| $6 to $12 | Travel, lifestyle, food, sports | Where most of my channels live |
| $2 to $6 | Gaming, entertainment, music, memes | Massive views, tiny rates |
Here's how I turn that into a financial cap for a specific niche. Type the niche into Social Blade, spend ten minutes finding the channels getting results, and look at their views. Social Blade's revenue estimate ("anywhere from 22,000 to 370,000 a month") is useless on its own, so you need the RPM for the niche. Bright Side does everything-and-anything content, so I know they're getting about two or three dollar RPMs, maybe four on a good day. Call it three. At their views, that channel is probably making about $200,000 a month.
The shortcut I use in vidIQ: views gained in the last 30 days, divided by 1,000, multiplied by about six. A psychology channel at 111,000 views comes out at $600 or $700 a month. One at 7.6 million views comes out at around $45,000. I don't look at the tool's "estimated revenue" line. I just do that math.
Two more things the tiers don't tell you.
The niches I actually recommend sit in the middle. When I went through my full niche list, the ad rates on nearly all of them were between $5 or $6 and $10 to $12 per thousand views. Meditation content is the exception at around a dollar per thousand. People watch those videos over and over, so you get more views, but you make way less. The per-niche numbers from my own channels are in YouTube RPM by niche.
The top tier is where the big channels don't need the views. Finance is the worst faceless YouTube niche to get into, and that's why it's not on my recommended list. Not because it doesn't pay. Because the finance people you compete with need 100,000 views a month and they're making a million dollars a month from their products. They don't care about ad revenue. Same thing in health: doctors with books and products don't need the views either.
So the 7x math at the top of this page cuts both ways. A $25 CPM is worth nothing if the channel never gets to 400,000 views.
2. Competition (25%): Is Anyone Winning Right Now?
Search your niche on YouTube and look at the top 20 channels. If they all have 1M+ subscribers and professional production, it's crowded. If you see channels with 50K to 200K subs getting 100K+ views, there's room. That's the version this page has always had. Here's what I'm looking for underneath it.
The first question I ask on any niche is whether someone else has already had success with it. I want a result I can replicate, so I don't have to validate the niche myself. Once I get a result, I can pivot and do my own thing.
The second question is how old the niche is. I learned this one the hard way. I went into a niche full of 100 million dollar companies, everyone told me it takes two to three years to get results, I thought they were wrong, and it took us about two years. So now I want to see channels that had success in the last six months, or at least the last eight months to a year. (The exception is a long-term brand where I don't care about short-term results, which is about half the channels I start these days. If you're after your first ten grand a month, you don't have that luxury.)
Beginners get competition backwards, so here's the definition.
If everybody in a niche is making 20 or 30 grand a month and there are lots of them, you can do 20 or 30 grand a month. What you don't want on a first channel is to be the only person in a market, because then you're validating it yourself and you don't even know what people want to watch yet. Saturation is a problem only when every channel has been there a very long time, nobody's gotten in recently, and the new ones are failing. Sports is my example of the good kind: someone will probably steal your idea, but there are more viewers to go around, and I have students who started within 6 months and were at 50 grand a month in it.
So "competition level" is really two filters, and I run them on every channel I find:
| Filter | What passes |
|---|---|
| Revenue | At least $10K to $30K a month, by the views-times-six math |
| Timeline | Started within the last 6 to 12 months, ideally |
A channel that passes both is the emulator for the new channel. The live walkthrough, where I ran this on psychology and found a $30,000 a month channel in under two minutes, is in how to pick a faceless YouTube niche in 4 steps.
3. Content Supply (20%): Can You Keep Making Videos Within Your Budget?
Can you produce 8 to 12 videos a month in this niche without running out of topics? Some niches, like specific product reviews, dry up fast. Others, like history, finance tips and health, are bottomless. This page has always called that content scalability. For me it's four questions about production.
How hard is the content to make? Watch the top channel's videos. If you can't tell, ask an editor how much time and what experience level they take. There are channels (a German one I love) that spend $50,000 per video. At that point the question is what competitive advantage you could possibly bring.
Is that within my budget? This decides more niches than taste does.
| Budget per video | What I said about it |
|---|---|
| $50 or less | Not a whole lot of channel ideas you can go after. You'll make up for it with your own skills: writing, revising, managing, hiring. |
| $200 to $300 | You can produce really good content. |
| $1,000 | Really good content, but don't blow through it with no YouTube experience. Book a call first. |
Does it fit a script, a voiceover and an edit? I only build channels a production team can run. If a niche relies purely on editing with no voiceover, chances are pretty high you're going to have monetization issues.
Can I hire an expert within my budget, or someone passionate? If I started a crypto channel, the people who actually know crypto want three to five hundred dollars a script, maybe a thousand, or a sizable piece of the channel. So I stay out of those niches. A microeconomics channel is the opposite: I can hire an economist, because economists don't get paid that much. Same with a historian, or someone who knows Formula 1 or space for fun. The full list of questions is in how I pick $100K YouTube niches.
Don't pick "Boston Celtics" or "college basketball 2001 to 2010." Pick basketball, find the most viral recent videos in it, and let that format become the channel. "Top 10 blank in the NBA" is a sub niche. "50 blank geography facts" is a sub niche. A Texas-only geography channel might make a couple thousand dollars a month and it's going to be a struggle. Full reasoning in how niche your YouTube channel should be.
The last supply question is what competitive advantage you bring: more quantity, better quality, better ideas or faster turnaround. When I started, I joined niches where the quality was awful and the videos were still getting millions of views a month. I wasn't even that good of an editor. I just cared more than everybody else, and if an idea came up today my video was out today, where other people took three days. Pick the niche where you can honestly check one of those boxes.
4. Evergreen Potential (15%): Will It Still Pay in 5 to 10 Years?
Will your videos still get views in 12 months? A video about an "iPhone 16 review" dies in 3 months. A video about "how compound interest works" gets views forever.
My version of the question is whether the content is profitable for the next five to ten years, or a quick cash grab. I aim for the ones that last, because I'm building brands. The trade is speed: the more evergreen a channel is, the more secure it is, and the slower it is to make money. My travel and geography channel took a long time to get going and is now one of the most stable 20 grand a month channels I have, with a lot of 30 and 40 year olds playing the videos on their television.
You can have both. I had a World War II history channel, Netflix made a World War II documentary, and all of a sudden our evergreen videos were trending. When the trend passed, they still got views. Aim for evergreen, catch trending luck along the way.
Trending niches are the opposite. Celebrity drama, news, anything that depends on new information: speed to produce is everything, and that's exactly why I avoid them.
One last rule, because it saves people months. If you upload 20 to 30 videos in a niche and can't find success, pivot to a different niche on the list. Sometimes a person just can't understand the content strategy of a niche that someone else can, and they crush a different one. That's information, not failure.
Niches I'd Start Today
This is the list this page has always carried, with what I've seen in each since.
| Niche | Why it's here | What I've seen |
|---|---|---|
| Personal finance for specific demographics (women, Gen Z, military) | High CPM, underserved audiences | Only with an audience the big channels ignore. Broad finance is the one niche I tell people to stay out of. |
| AI tools and productivity | Massive search volume, high CPM, always new content | Treat it like STEM: a high-sophistication audience that expects something it can't get anywhere else. |
| History documentaries | Bottomless content, high retention, solid CPMs | The World War II channel above. Slow start, then very stable. Older viewers hesitate on a new channel, so trust takes time. |
| True crime and public records | Enormous audience, high watch time | The fastest money on my list and the highest chance of failing. Body cam and courtroom footage is fair use, but R-rated content gets shadowbanned and YouTube won't tell you why. |
| Health and longevity | Aging population, high CPMs, evergreen topics | 20 grand a month pretty reasonably. The trends move fast and you can't say "cure" anymore. |
The full breakdown of ten niches, with the vocabulary (TAM, market sophistication, limited ads, age gating), is in my full guide to the best faceless YouTube niches.
Niches I'd Avoid
| Niche | Why |
|---|---|
| Generic motivation | Brutally oversaturated in the bad sense (old channels, nobody new winning), low CPMs. |
| Gaming compilations | $2 to $3 CPM ceiling. |
| Celebrity gossip as a first channel | One of the easiest niches to get into, and when something is going down people print money. But there's a lot of dry time between news cycles, speed decides who wins, and there's a risk of legal letters. If you do it, treat it as a couple of years of cash, then move on. |
| ASMR, meditation and sleep | Tiny CPMs, around a dollar per thousand on meditation content. Plateaus fast. |
| Anything that needs a $500 to $1,000 a script expert | Crypto and trading. The people who know it won't write for cheap and they'll want equity. |
| Anything too specific | Texas geography, one NBA team, one era. A couple thousand dollars a month at best. |
The system works across all niches, but the math only works in the right ones.
Some niches work with a logical brain (sports, STEM) and some with an emotional one (spirituality, storytelling, public records). I went to school for computer science and resonated with the logical content first. When logical people do an emotional niche they really struggle, and the other way around. Know which one you are before you score anything.
The 4-Step Research Process
Scoring is the thinking. This is the doing, and it doesn't have to be a long drawn out process.
- Pick three to five broad topics. Ask ChatGPT for faceless YouTube niches that work in an explainer or listicle style. Keep them broad (business, money, luxury and wealth). Don't pick on passion. Pick what you think you can make money in.
- Look up the top keywords in each topic.
- Create a brand new YouTube channel for research and search those keywords on it. Subscribe to every faceless channel you find so the algorithm shows you twenty more, turn on vidIQ, and run the views-times-six math on each one.
- Decide. Revenue of $10K to $30K a month, started in the last 6 to 12 months, listicle or explainer. If two niches both pass, it's a coin toss. Pick one.
Then come back to the scorecard above. The channel you found is your emulator. The four criteria tell you whether you can beat it.
Video Chapters
- 0:00Why your niche decides the ceiling
- 0:30Pick a broad topic
- 1:31Research three to five niches at first
- 2:35Look up the top keywords
- 3:06Make a research channel
- 4:08Find the faceless channels
- 4:39Estimate revenue with vidIQ
- 6:13The four steps
- 7:15Production style and difficulty
- 10:21Running it again on internet culture
- 11:53The two filters: revenue and timeline
- 12:57Decide
FAQ
How do I pick a YouTube niche that makes money?
Devon Canup scores a niche on CPM potential, competition, content supply and evergreen value, then looks for a channel in it that started in the last 6 to 12 months and already makes $10K to $30K a month. If one exists, he copies its format. He picks for money first and passion second until the channel is paying.
What is the highest paying YouTube niche?
Finance, investing, real estate, business and insurance, at $20 and up per 1,000 views. Devon Canup calls broad finance the worst faceless niche to enter, because the established channels make a million dollars a month from products on 100,000 views and don't need ad revenue. He aims at the $6 to $12 tier, where his channels get the views.
How do I know how much a YouTube channel makes?
Devon Canup takes the channel's views from the last 30 days in vidIQ or Social Blade, divides by 1,000 and multiplies by about six. A channel at 7.6 million views a month comes out at around $45,000. He ignores the tool's estimated revenue line.
Is a saturated YouTube niche bad?
No. Devon Canup says market saturation just means more channels are doing the thing, and if many of them make 20 or 30 grand a month, the money is there. It is only a problem when every channel is old, nobody has entered recently and new channels are failing.
Should my YouTube channel be broad or specific?
Stay broad and let the video format narrow it. Devon Canup's examples are a basketball channel that becomes a "top 10 in the NBA" channel and a geography channel that becomes a "50 geography facts" channel. A channel about one team or only Texas geography caps at a couple thousand dollars a month.
How many videos should I post before changing niche?
Devon Canup gives a niche 20 to 30 videos. If there is no success by then, he pivots to another niche on the list, since some people can run a niche that someone else cannot figure out.
Want This Built With You?
Faceless Channel Academy is the coaching program I run for people building faceless YouTube channels: niche, formats, team, packaging, with an advisor and live calls. Book a free strategy call and we'll look at where you are and whether it's a fit.
Book a Free Strategy Call →Not ready to talk? Grab the free niche research template first.
