YouTube Question Does anyone else find 'niching down' hard to balance?

[Jake Nickel]

One of the pieces of advice I hear pretty often is to 'niche down' your content. As new or small Youtubers, we can't compete with more popular channels. We have to make our content more and more specific so that it serves a single purpose and perhaps could fill a void, so when the odd people go looking for some specific thing here or there, they might find your channel.

The problem I find with that is that the more you niche down, the less interest there is in your specific niche. For example, I make commentary comedy videos about sociology. No one goes looking for comedy/sociology fusion. If someone were looking for a funny take on Erving Goffman's theories on presentation of self then they would probably find me, but the problem is there are very very few people looking for my specific niche.

What do you think? Is this a common issue? Is it a problem with the way I promote my channel? I find this to be a paradox where in order to become popular, we must first make videos on such specific topics that barely anyone could possibly be seeking out.

 

[DamoΓÇÖs Paintings]

In my honest opinion, it depends on the niche, gaming I hear is a very crowded niche, because basically any gamer can make gaming videos, making it difficult to make it big in that niche, the competition is just too big, whereas art, specifically oil painting, while not as big as gaming, is still a tricky niche to make it big, and yeah there are a lot of artists trying to out do each other within the niche, but if one of those artists can produce a painting that NO OTHER artist has done, say for example the Boeing 787 Dreamliner Cockpit, one that so far, then people start noticing your channel, I specialize mostly in automotive art, where IΓÇÖm painting supercars hooning along the road, and this is whatΓÇÖs starting to make people notice my channel, and this is because I researched the niche I was gonna enter, find the gaps that needed filling, and am working on filling them, itΓÇÖs not just the art niche, this applies to any niche, just gotta research it and find the gaps that need filling, then do what you can to fill them, if you want to rent into content creating. This is just my 41 cents worth of advice

 

[Welcome to Gaming]

I've took on that advice but my channel is still a mix of sports video games, I just can't bring myself to play one game. I have a friend who started about 9 months ago only playing WWE 2K20 and he's totally blown up! He's at 300 subs and 80K overall views. He's just started to diversify his content away from just playing the game but it's still all wrestling related.

 

[Damon]

Yup! It's a very common issue. Sooner or later you'll niche down to where there is only one human being on earth wanting to watch your footage!

On the plus side of niching down is when you have a business selling widgets. If only a few people want to buy that widget, you can talk directly to the people who are ready to buy. The more you niche down in a business sense, the closer people are to a buying decision.

For instance I sell custom wooden handline fishing reels. Very little traffic compared to the larger topic of fishing in general. But people who type 'fishing' in YouTube's search bar aren't interested in buying anything. The people typing 'wooden handling reels' are searching for something specific that they are interested in buying.

"Fine," you may say. "That's works well for business, but what about entertainment?" Well, the same holds true. Nicheing down can help you niche up. When you focus on one specific thing, and dominate that, you will naturally see your videos found is higher level niches.

"Okay, great, how the heck do you know if you've niched down into oblivion or will ever have a chance to rise?"

Commit to three videos a week for five years. It's math really.

3 videos * 52 week = 156 video per year
156 video/yr * 5 years = 780 video

Once you get into that 500 to 1,000 video range, you should be starting to hit a stride. The shear mass of content, even niched down, you should start to see your videos pop up in higher traffic niches. Then you can target those higher niches and move on. That's how my channel has developed, your mileage may vary.

 

[MidlifewithSweetT]

I can sympathize. The trick from what I understand is to niche down and hyper focus one one aspect of the niche and make a ton of variations on that subject so that you become an expert there even if itΓÇÖs a limited base. Then diversify by including trends so you get picked up more and because your an expert it blows up. So simple right? And yet I am stuck with what My niche is...lol. Good luck!

 

[Beanie Draws]

One of the pieces of advice I hear pretty often is to 'niche down' your content. As new or small Youtubers, we can't compete with more popular channels. We have to make our content more and more specific so that it serves a single purpose and perhaps could fill a void, so when the odd people go looking for some specific thing here or there, they might find your channel.

The problem I find with that is that the more you niche down, the less interest there is in your specific niche. For example, I make commentary comedy videos about sociology. No one goes looking for comedy/sociology fusion. If someone were looking for a funny take on Erving Goffman's theories on presentation of self then they would probably find me, but the problem is there are very very few people looking for my specific niche.

What do you think? Is this a common issue? Is it a problem with the way I promote my channel? I find this to be a paradox where in order to become popular, we must first make videos on such specific topics that barely anyone could possibly be seeking out.

I still think 'niche down' is important. and think of it this way... (I don't know much a sociology so my example may be off) if someone were to look for a funny take on Erving Goffman's theory, they would find you, but if you were doing a more broad topic that is broadly looked for, your competition would be super high.

For me, I love dinosaur art, That's a pretty specific niche of art. Not as many people are looking for dinosaur art as they are, art in general. So I might get less people looking for Dinosaur art... BUT, if I were to do general art, I'd be competing against the thousands and millions of others making general art.

Be the master of something specific, be known for something specific, instead of just throwing general ideas out and hoping something will stick. "Jack of all trades, master of none"

Another example of this, is I tried a "how to draw an eye" which has been done to death on YouTube by many other art channels before me, thus my video didn't perform very well at all.
Very few have done "how to draw a mosasaurus" which is why instead THAT video got hundreds of thousands of views.

I still think having a more specified Niche helps you out a lot.

Rosana Pansino does cooking, and nerdy stuff, so she combined it to do cooking nerdy themed stuff, which made her stand out from the general boring cooking shows.