FatRat told me that he really enjoyed my super long guide to YouTube and would like more on the subject, so yeah, here it is. Thank you Felix (FatRat) for your kind words, and I hope you and everyone else who reads this gets something out of it.
When you're starting your YouTube channel, one of the most important issues that you have to grapple with is what kind of content you are going to post. Of course, you should go with whatever feels the most natural to you, but if you have some control over the decision and want some pointers on how to maximize your audience or whatever, here they are. I actually don't have that much to say on the matter, so this article might actually be somewhat short for a change.
The problem with finding your YouTube niche is a matter of balance, like a lot of things in life. The first thing you want to consider is how big you want your niche to be. If you're confused as to what a niche is, here's a chain of video niches from small to large: Lvl 50 Halo 3 Team Snipers -> Halo 3 Team Snipers -> Team Snipers -> Any Sniper Footage -> Any Halo Footage
A bigger niche leads to the following breakdown:
Pros
- Access to a bigger potential fanbase - Since a lot of people on YouTube nowadays only seem to care about numbers (mainly the amount of subscibers that they have), this is very important. A pointer that I would like to give to the Halo community based on what I've seen is to not underestimate the casual Halo population. While casual Halo players may not be as vocal as the hardcore gamers, casuals will always have strength in numbers (just look at how many people are in the MLG playlist at any given time). In the beginning, Nak3dEli dedicated his channel to content for the casual crowd (basic tips, cR guides, other stuff hardcore players don't really care about), and his channel is now booming. In order to identify how big your niche actually is, you need to identify the demographics within whatever community you're appealing to and how large each demographic is.
For my explanation on why most montages lack casual appeal, read the paragraph that starts with the sentence, "So why is commentary so powerful?", which comes from this article:
The Decline of the Halo Community - My Theory Behind Its Cause
- More flexibility in what you can post - For example, if your niche is all of video gaming, you can start posting content from any new game that comes out, which isn't something you could do if you were just a Halo or CoD channel
Cons
- Harder to maintain - You will have to keep track of more categories and make sure that you're posting a regular amount of content in each one
- More competition - The actual companies that run YouTube channels (IGN, NextGen, etc) generally have large niches because they're more concerned with maximizing view count than subscriber base
A smaller niche leads to the following breakdown:
Pros
- More loyal fans and a higher conversion rate of views to subscribers - When people subscribe to monster channels like Machinima and IGN, they probably weren't exactly looking for it. They were probably on YouTube, saw a video from them (because these channels are everywhere), and thought, "Hey, I like video games and this channel seems to have a lot of stuff concerning video games. I think I will subscribe.". Someone who subscribes to a channel that only posts Lvl 50 Halo 3 Team Snipers gameplay on the other hand was almost certainly looking for a channel that specifically focuses on Lvl 50 Halo 3 Team Snipers gameplay. This person obviously came in with a very narrow goal in mind, and given how there usually aren't very many channels that satisfy very narrow goals, the person is likely to be quite loyal to whatever channels he/she found that met this goal.
- Easier to maintain, less competition, the opposites of the cons for a large niche
Cons
- Access to smaller potential fanbase, less flexibility, the opposite of pros for a large niche
Another issue that comes with niche finding is timing. You want to establish your niche very early on in the lifespan of your channel so that your initial followers (your most important followers) know what to expect from you. Hesitation concerning what you want to do shows and will hurt you. When potential fans look over your channel and see a collection of videos with no apparent direction, they are less likely to subscribe because they're not sure if you're going to consistently deliver what they're looking for. You also want to make extra sure that whatever niche you settle into is something that you will be fine working in for the rest of your YouTube career/hobby/whatever. As more and more time passes, your followers will become more and more accustomed to expecting X from you, where X is whatever niche you have settled into. Any change concerning content that you make will result in more and more backlash over time in the form of your fans leaving you when they find out that you're not doing X anymore or have started doing Y alongside X.
The strength of a niche depends heavily on how topical the niche is. Topicality is how relevant something is in modern times. Right now, PSY's "Gangnam Style" and to a lesser extent, Justin Bieber, are what's topical nowadays on YouTube. When it comes to topical niches, their longevity is usually inversely related to their effectiveness, meaning that the more effective a topical niche is, the shorter it will last. For example, I think that Gangnam Style will start losing its steam incredibly rapidly in a few months, but right now, it's undeniably on top of the world. The video is at around 200 million views and it's picking up around 5 million views a day or something else ridiculous. Parodies and spin-offs of the song are flourishing, racking up millions of views at the upper end. Justin Bieber, on the other hand, has always been kind of there for the last year or two, and the more popular videos related to him that aren't his music videos can still get hundreds of thousands to a few million views. Unlike Gangnam Style though, I think Justin Bieber has another good year or two of relevance, similar to Miley Cyrus' roughly 3 year span in the sun. No matter what though, topical niches give you a lot of bang for your buck, given that you identify them quickly and move into them as soon as possible. The first YouTubers to move into CoD are booming right now, and it very clearly shows. Essentially all of the top YouTube gamers found their start in CoD. CoD is an entire video game franchise making this not the best example, but the point is that these YouTubers identified the boom and moved into it accordingly (or just lucksacked into it). In the end, if you're going the topical route, keep in mind that your channel's future will be sketchy. Or you can cheat like a lot of big YouTubers and just make content on whatever's the most topical at the moment (PhilipDeFranco, RWJ, etc).
Lastly, I want to go more in depth into longevity. Longevity is something's staying power; for the purpose of this article, it is the lifespan of whatever niche you end up choosing. You obviously want to choose a niche that possesses a great amount of longevity, an amount that is at the very least whatever amount of time you want to stay on YouTube. For example, a couple years back I stumbled across a channel that specialized in MLG footage in Halo. Nowadays, that channel is kind of screwed given Halo's current situation in MLG. Expect the unexpected; life's mean and shit happens. Concerning niche size, the larger a niche is, the more longevity it generally has. This is tied in to a niche's flexibility. For example, the longevity of a channel that specializes in all of video games depends on the future of the entire video games industry. As long as video games exist and are popular, this channel will have a place on YouTube. The longevity of a channel that only specializes in Halo on the other hand depends on this singleton franchise, which, as most of you probably know, has had a shaky past and similarly, a shaky future. In summary, plan for the future when choosing your niche, like for everything else you do in life.
So that is all I have to say about niches. If you're currently looking for help on what direction to take your channel in content-wise, I hope that this helps. Thanks for reading and take care.
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