New channel - Your opinions on niche?

[Asoe209]

Morning all, hopefully i'm posting in the right section here apologies if i am not.

So basically in short i'm was hoping to get some of your opinions and thoughts around a new channel, and niches.

I am in the process of starting a new channel with the main focus on inline skating, as i am just about to start getting back into the sport and though why not put the journey on YT. Im thinking at the moment that i would capture my progression in skating, do some kind of vlog and eventuality tutorials and reviews.

Hears where the my issues lies or i may just be over thinking as I have heard that when its best to have a niche. As I also want to practice on my video skills I was looking to also do normal type vlog of the travels that i go on, an possibly reviews on other bits of kit that use around photography as i am also doing that.

So I wonder if this type of content on one channel would throw people off.

what are your thoughts to this?

 

[Min/Max Munchking]

Speaking from personal experience, focusing on one thing narrowly and exclusively at the very beginning is better to gain some traction, any traction.

I don't doubt there are variety channels out there that still take off, but the only thing that worked for me so far (I've tried YT 5 times so far), is a very narrow mini-niche within a sub-niche within a sub-niche, with just enough existing and new audience to drive new views and subscribers.

I don't know anything about inline skating. I don't even know what it is (googling it right after I type this to appease my ADHD impulses), but if you can find something even more narrow within the sub-niche of inline skating that still has a reasonable number of people who'd be willing to search for content on YouTube and hopefully find your videos interesting, that would further lower your competition and allow you to rank higher on search results pages and hopefully land more often on your audience's homepage every time you upload a new video.

EDIT: Oh so inline skating is basically rollerblades? I know what that is ofc, I don't live in Narnia lol. I don't know what the niche size is on YT, but if there are a dozen or so channels with tens/hundreds of thousands of subscribers that keep getting tens/hundreds of thousands of views on their videos, that would sort-of be similar to my own niche, at least in terms of numbers.

 

[Asoe209]

Thanks for the reply.

well i would say its pretty niche in it self but that is just my view. There are about 5 channels that i watch on a regular basis, each have there own sort of style and experience levels around skating. i have come across some smaller channels as well i guess there difference with theirs is some of the content is not as polished and inactivity on the channels.

i'm thinking to take a bit of a different approach around it. the think that is different for me is i'm coming back into the spot as a newbie (at least 15+ years since i last strapped on a pair lol) hopefully there is interest viewing someone progress rather than coming in all guns blazing.

so by the sounds of it stick to the skating, and later introduce the other aspects once there is a bit of an audience.

 

[Min/Max Munchking]

Thanks for the reply.

well i would say its pretty niche in it self but that is just my view. There are about 5 channels that i watch on a regular basis, each have there own sort of style and experience levels around skating. i have come across some smaller channels as well i guess there difference with theirs is some of the content is not as polished and inactivity on the channels.

i'm thinking to take a bit of a different approach around it. the think that is different for me is i'm coming back into the spot as a newbie (at least 15+ years since i last strapped on a pair lol) hopefully there is interest viewing someone progress rather than coming in all guns blazing.

so by the sounds of it stick to the skating, and later introduce the other aspects once there is a bit of an audience.

Yeah. One thing though - come up with something unique, different, never-before-seen. Some kind of twist that no other YT channel in your niche does, or at least doesn't do it in a way you do it.

For me, it's a combo of intro stories at the start of video + super long videos (up to 2 hours) where I go into stupidly deep details about each and every little detail of the D&D character builds and ways to optimize and play optimally.

Despite this approach giving me super low audience retention (only 10% of my total video length gets watched), I have decent CTR, my videos rank on YT search (40% of my traffic), I have decent engagement and I've built a small community.

I still have a crapton of distance to cover as I haven't broken even the 3k subs mark, but the channel is already paying for itself and all I need to do now is invest into more videos, better quality videos and try and maybe expand the range of topics I cover.

You should aim to do something like that too in my opinion.