Should your channel be a niche, or variety?

Dutchie Abroad

Exploring the world one video at a time!
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if anything else we could always do a double shoutout or something of that nature. Like pick a day and we shout each others channels out. Any help at all would be tremendous.
Sorry, but this has a) nothing to do with the current discussion and b) wouldn't be useful at all since you two have very different audiences/niches.
 

Ater

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The problem is, I literally play anything and everything. I like to talk about the most recent news, and i do reviews for games as well. I've not done any let's play videos, and I'm unsure if I want to do that.

So my question is, is gaming as a whole too broad?
First of I agree to everything that Dutchie Abroad wrote, check out her response I you haven't already. But I do have a thing to add, it's your channel so everything depends on what your goal is. If you are enjoining doing the type of content you are currently doing and are okay with slow or no growth, keep on doing what you are doing as long as you enjoy it. But for growth most people really need to find a niche and in a crowded scene like gaming a niche may not be enough you may have to find a niche within a nice or even a niche within a niche within a niche for people to find your videos.

You say that you like to talk about the most recent news. Well gaming news is a niche. But maybe you can make it into a niche within a niche? You could become the guy who do strategy gaming news? But maybe that's not enough maybe you need to do a niche within a niche within a niche. Maybe you start out doing news for only one curtain strategy game? But maybe that's not enough maybe that game is very popular and a lot of people are already posting news about it? Well maybe you need to take it one step further, beaning that guy who talk about the most recent news for that small little strategy game that few other people post about. With time you become the number once source on YouTube for news about that game, you start building subscribers and views. As your channel grows maybe you can now start branching out making news for one or two other strategy games and now beaning a bit larger channel you can actually compete for bigger more popular strategy games. And then later on you take the next step, stops focusing on just does 2-4 games and becomes the main strategy gaming news channel on YouTube.

That's kind of the route I'm taking for my channel. I started out doing content for a huge and very popular game. Clearly I had no chance in competing against thousands of other much larger channels. After a while I decided to try making content for a much smaller game, so small that the biggest channels focusing on it have less then 80k subs. But even with this much smaller niche I couldn't compete with all the established channels. So I did some research about the niche and found that a lot of people where doing let's plays but almost nobody was doing tutorials so I tried to do a few tutorials for the game and finally my channel started to get traffic and subscribers. I recently decided to branch out to another pretty small game that just got released and I used what I had learned and decided to focus on tutorials from day one. I expected that since the game where about to get released there would be a bit of hype for the game and bigger channels would defiantly do tutorials for the game. So instead of just doing a broad "learn to play the game" tutorials which I expected most bigger channels would do I decided to make it more niche, smaller tutorials for specific things, like how do you do X in the game and how do you fix Y in the game. And I was correct most other channels did the beginners guide but where few did the more specific tutorials and I got a bunch of views and new subs from them.

I still did let's plays for the new game just for fun since I was enjoying it but while most of my let's play episodes where getting less than 100 views most of my tutorials have reached 7k+ views with the more popular once reaching 10k+. I know that is tiny compared to big channels here, but for a smaller channel like mine that's great numbers and since the game have only been out for a few weeks I expect does numbers to keep on growing as more people pick up the game, especially when the price go down during sales but also when the developers release major patches. I wouldn't bee surprise to see some of the tutorials having reached multiple times there current numbers in a year or two.