The YouTube Niches I Actually Recommend Starting in 2026

If you're trying to figure out which niche to start a YouTube channel in right now in 2026, stop. Because what I'm about to share with you is going to completely change the way that you look at choosing a niche. And I know that sounds dramatic, but I've started and scaled over a dozen different YouTube channels. I've made over $10 million doing this, and I'm not saying this to brag, but just saying this to tell you that the biggest mistake that people make on this platform that keeps their views low, keeps them broke, is choosing the wrong niche. And most people get it catastrophically wrong. They chase what seems to be getting the most amount of views. They do what they think is going to make them the most amount of money. And that's the wrong way of going about doing this. Now, I'm going to give you the exact niches that I personally am starting right now in 2026. But before I do that, you need to understand something first, because if you don't understand this, the niches themselves are not going to necessarily help you. It's like handing you the keys to a Ferrari that you don't know how to drive, and this is going to save you months, maybe even years of wasted effort. Here's the paradox of choosing a niche that nobody talks about. The niches that get the most amount of views views on YouTube are typically the worst niches to be in. And I know that sounds insane because you're probably thinking more views equals more money, right? That's what everybody assumes. But let me put this in perspective for you. I have channels in low CPM niches that get millions of views per month, some over 10 million views per month. And I have channels in other niches, some of the ones I'm going to be showing you here today, that actually make more money even though they're getting way less views than the niches that are getting millions of views per month. In a low CPM niche, you might only be making $2 per 1,000 views, meaning you would need 500,000 views just to make $1,000. But in a high CPM niche, if you monetize it correctly, you could be making $30, $40, $50+ per 1,000 views. And so a video that gets 20,000 views in the right niche can outperform a video that gets a million views in the wrong one. And so views really don't matter as much as most people think. And what does matter? Well, this is where this gets very interesting and it ties directly into the niches that I'm about to show you. But first, there is a second paradox that you need to hear because this one is even more counterintuitive than the first. The niches with the least amount of competition are usually the hardest to succeed in. And that might make no sense because you might be thinking, well, competition is a bad thing, right? And on the surface, yes, that seems logical, but here's what's really happening. If a niche has almost no competition, there's usually a reason for that. Not always. There are some, you know, undiscovered niches waiting to be found, I'm sure. However, 9 times out of 10, the reason that a niche doesn't have much competition is because there's no proven demand. And it means that nobody's figured out how to actually make money in that space. It could also mean that the audience doesn't exist or they don't care enough to watch videos consistently. So when I'm evaluating a niche, I actually want to see competition. I want to see other channels getting views. I wanna see videos with 50,000, 100,000, 500,000 views on topics in that niche because that tells me that there is an audience then that is willing to consume that content. And it tells me that if I then make something better, that's more valuable within that niche, the algorithm already knows who to show it to. And that brings me to the criteria that I use for starting a channel, which is going to lead me directly into the niches that I recommend. But the criteria actually matters a lot more than the niches themselves. So this is really important that you hear this and I'll explain why in a second. My first criteria is that a niche has to have a decent to a high CPM, and that's how much a channel makes per 1,000 views from ad revenue. You might be saying, Matt, on other videos on your channel, you say that ad revenue isn't important at all, and it really isn't. It's just a nice extra to have. So why is that one of my criteria? Well, it's one of my criteria because if advertisers are willing to pay a lot of money to put ads on your videos, is due to the fact that they're likely profitable and that they're selling things that people want. They're selling solutions to people's problems and people are buying them. And so the CPM is a proxy as to how valuable the audience is. The second criteria, and this is one that almost everybody overlooks, is that the niche has to have problems that people are desperate to solve, not just mildly interested in. For example, yes, there are huge channels that teach people how to play specific different video games But is that a real burning problem in a lot of people's lives that they're willing to pay money to solve? Probably not for the majority of games. There may be certain edge cases and exceptions where people actually make money with video gaming and everything else. However, for the majority of games, that's not the case. However, what about the fact that AI is gonna be replacing tons of jobs within the next 10 years? That's a burning problem that's going to affect a lot of people. And so people are going to be desperate to solve that problem and watch videos in it and buy products in it because desperation drives action. And action drives revenue. Yes, entertainment videos can drive millions of views, but entertainment viewers are way less likely to take any action at all. They just scroll to the next video because they're just trying to get a dopamine hit in their brain. But the best types of niches are educational niches where people have burning problems that they want to solve. That is where the money is. Now the third criteria is that the niche has to be evergreen. This means that the content that you create today has to be relevant a year from now, 2 years from now, even 5 years from now. I don't like to be tracing trending topics that are going to die within a week. Once I have a huge, you know, established channel in a niche, occasionally I'll do a trending topic video because I know it'll pull a lot of views that month. But that's the thing, it'll pull views that month, not necessarily for the lifetime of the channel. I'm still making money from videos I uploaded when I was 14 and 15 years old. That are still paying me to this day because they were hyper-relevant videos then and they're hyper-relevant videos now. I don't want my entire channel to become irrelevant if a certain news cycle moves on. I want to create a video once, optimize it properly, and have it working for me passively in the background, making me money every single month. That is the power of evergreen content. And this eliminates a huge number of niches that people think are good right now but are actually traps. And now here's where this really gets good, and this is the third paradox that I've discovered after running so many different channels myself and overseeing people running a lot of different channels, and it's probably the most important one. The niche that you're really passionate about, that you love, is not usually the niche that you should start with. And I know every other YouTube guru out there tells you to follow your passion and do all these things, and in some cases it's great advice if your passion is something that a lot of people have a burning problem about. For example, if you're passionate about helping people do something that's going to genuinely improve their lives and solve a huge problem in their lives, that's awesome. You should go all in on that. And I'm gonna show you the niches here in a second that if your passion aligns with them, go all in on them. But for the majority of people, that's not going to be the case. You're very lucky if it is. And also from my own life, I've observed that, you know, passions, they come and go. Sometimes I'm super passionate about teaching YouTube and doing this stuff, but other times I'm really passionate about things like submarines. But there's no real way of monetizing that. And so here's a realistic way of doing this. You find an overlap between 3 things: something that you can tolerate talking or learning about, and this applies even if you're running a faceless channel and even if you're outsourcing it to a content team like my content team, TubeAutomate.com. Let's say you're hiring them to make your videos for you. So you're not even involved in the content. You might be thinking, I don't have to have any interest at all. It helps to have a little bit of an interest, because you will still oversee the videos and it will still be your channel at the end of the day, so it helps. The second thing is that it has a proven audience on YouTube that's proven to watch videos similar to that with over 50,000 views on them. And the third thing, it has to have clear monetization paths beyond just ad revenue. If you can find that overlap, you have a gold mine, and the niches I'm about to give you will hit that sweet spot. But only do them if you have a little bit of an interest in them. Now before I reveal them, I need to explain one more thing that's going to completely change how you approach this. Because in 2026, things have shifted in a way that a lot of people haven't caught up to yet. And if you don't understand this, then even picking the right niche is not going to save you. What's changed is that in 2026, the YouTube algorithm is pushing content based off of viewer interest more than ever before. It used to be that the algorithm would recommend videos from people that you're already subscribed to or videos that were trending, but now YouTube is acting more like a search engine crossed with a recommendation engine. It's looking at what you're interested in as a viewer and serving you content from channels that you may not have ever even heard of. And this is huge for new channels, and it's great news for them because you can get views a lot easier today than you could years ago. Because it doesn't mean that you need hundreds of thousands of subscribers in order to potentially have huge videos on your channel and for YouTube to push your content. What you need is the right topic, the right packaging, and the right niche. And if you have those three things, YouTube will find the audience for you. And this is also why faceless channels are doing better than ever right now. People aren't going to YouTube to necessarily watch a specific person. They're going because they're interested in a topic, they want to learn something. And when you search stuff like "how to invest in your early 20s," you want to learn how to do that, not how to invest in your early 20s according to some specific person. You search based off of interest rather than personality. And that means that you can position yourself within a niche that people have burning interest and unsolved problems, and then YouTube's new interest-based algorithm is going to do the heavy lifting for you. And now before I get into the niches that I recommend, let me go over really quickly the niches that I would avoid at all costs because I've seen so many channels get destroyed by going into one of these topics. And these are topics like true crime where you're talking about a crime that never happened, especially if you're using AI to generate stories. This includes Reddit videos where you're just doing Reddit stories on YouTube. It includes news and political commentary channels that AI had a hand in making because it may not always be accurate. It includes even make money online content that has huge claims in it where you say, "I'm gonna teach you how to make, you know, $500 a day guaranteed." When you say those things, that puts your channel at a huge risk and tons of channels have been getting banned, even ones making over $1 million a year. Fake movie trailer channels using actual copyrighted characters using AI. And the common thread across all of these is that these are niches that don't provide any new, real genuine value. You can definitely provide this value even using AI tools. I have several AI tools myself like TubeMagic and vid.ai. But the thing about these tools is that it allows people to give more value with their videos because they can do things like add in input videos on TubeMagic, for example, and then it will take the best parts of those videos to make something new and you'll have a better video by definition. So the theme with the niches I'm about to show you is that they're niches that if you do them the right way by giving genuine value, you can absolutely crush it right now today, even using AI tools. In fact, I'd even recommend using AI tools. Because it'll save you so much time. And so now you know what to avoid. You understand the paradoxes, you understand the criteria, you understand the algorithmic shift that's happening. Now let me give you the actual niches. I'm not just going to list broad categories like every single other video does. I'm going to give you specific sub-niches within these categories because that is where the real money is made. Because just choosing a broad category like health is not going to work. You need it to go specific. The first niche, and this is one that I'm personally starting channels in right now, is YouTube education. You're watching a YouTube education video right now. Videos on this topic have hundreds of thousands of views. They're very validated. You can easily sell things within this niche, including software. I have several software companies. You can sell courses, and you can be an affiliate for these things as well. So it hits all the criteria. This is something very evergreen. YouTube's only going to be growing over the next 10 years. So YouTube education is an amazing niche, and you can even do it in a faceless way. As I mentioned, I'm starting new channels within this niche, like Stickman Matt, for example, which is already doing incredibly good. So YouTube education is amazing. You don't need to be the biggest expert in the world to start a channel within this niche either. You just need to know more than the majority of people. And if you're watching this content, that is likely the case for you. The second niche is personal finance for specific life stages, not just personal finance because that's too broad. I'm talking about personal finance for people in their 20s. Or personal finance for people in their 50s, or personal finance for single parents. And if you search, for example, personal finance in your 50s, you'll see channels like Kevin Lum right here who gets almost a million views per month. And mind you, this is a very high CPM niche. He does a lot of videos like, if you're in your 50s or 60s, make these 5 critical financial moves. And this specificity that's calling out to a particular subset of people is so powerful no matter what niche that you're in. I'm going to show you a few more examples of this. In several other niches as well, but this is incredibly powerful. His channel does incredibly well. There's also faceless channels that do this, like Blissful Retirement Haven, for example, that is doing incredibly good. And again, you don't need to be the world's foremost expert on personal finance when you have tools like TubeMagic where you can put in multiple different context videos that have already done really good and they get an original script that's going to be even better. The next niche is travel tips and tutorials within a specific sub-niche. I'm not talking about generic travel vlogs, you know, where someone just walks around Paris and talks about things to do. I mean educational problem-solving content like cruise tips and tricks, like for example Cruise Like a Pro, which does super well, or airline hacks and airport secrets like the channel Passport Pro, or packing strategies, channels like Pack Hacker, or places to retire abroad, channels like Scary Harry do really good with this. One of the biggest advertisers on YouTube is Expedia, which is a travel company. So they're going to put their ads on travel videos, driving up the CPM within this niche. Also, you can easily sell a program within this niche. I would recommend using Moon, which is another one of my companies, and it basically allows you to create a community that you can charge money for. So you could create a community of people who are interested in this, and it can come with different courses and even coaching if you want as well. And you can charge a set amount for this. And make a lot more than just ad revenue. And these channels like Cruise Like a Pro and Passport Pro, these are channels that you can generate these types of videos using software like my software, VidAI, that allows you to generate these simple stock footage videos with a realistic voiceover that's indistinguishable from a human. And you can generate these in a few minutes, identical videos to this, using vid.ai. The next niche is health and longevity or specific demographics. Again, not just health, not just fitness. I'm talking about channels that focus on health for men, for example, over 50, mobility exercises for office workers, longevity and anti-aging science. This niche is blowing up right now because there's a huge cultural shift where people are trying to be more healthy and a lot of people are obsessed with living longer, living better, and optimizing their health. And CPMs are reflecting this accordingly with tons of health companies and supplement companies advertising on YouTube. And this is an audience that takes action as well. And there's examples of faceless channels like Captain Workout as well as Yellow Dude that do faceless tutorials showing how to work out. It's not even a real person, they're completely faceless, they get millions of views per month. And there's also personal channels like for example this guy who recently did a hyper-specific video on his channel talking about 'Creatine for People Over 50.' So a hyper-specific supplement on a hyper-specific demographic, combining those two together, it seems so specific, like how could that video do well? There are tons of people who are interested in it and that video called out specifically to them and it did really well. All the other videos on his channel weren't doing very well, but that changed the trajectory of his channel, it got over a million views. Another niche that's really overlooked right now is pet content. And I know what you might be thinking, like, pet content, is that really something people have burning problems in that they want to solve? And yes, it turns out that it is. Pet owners are incredibly passionate. They spend a lot of money on their pets. And I remember growing up with dogs and cats, and if there was ever like a health concern or a behavioral issue or something like that, the first place I went was YouTube. I was able to train my dog completely just through YouTube videos. The CPM is solid because there's huge pet companies advertising on these, and there's very few high-quality channels that are focused on specific breeds. I think this is a huge under-tapped opportunity of doing videos like, for example, how to train a German Shepherd dog specifically. Look at this channel called The Purring Journal. It's in the cat niche, they never show their face, it's literally just stock footage videos. They get 337,000 views a month, they're an affiliate for a bunch of different products, probably making around $10,000 a month from all their different sources, and if they had a course on top of that, they could even make a lot more. Other channels are Smart Dog Lover, Animal Facts, and Animal Wize, which are all faceless channels in the pet niche. Now the next niche is the make money online niche. And I know you might be thinking, Matt, didn't you say earlier in this video to avoid the make money online niche at all costs? And yes, I did, if you do it wrong. And the majority of people do. When you do videos like how to make $500 a day or saying specific things, you can get in trouble for that and videos will get taken down. I've actually faced some of that here on my channel. As well. And I think YouTube is doing these actions to protect themselves from agencies like the FTC, for example, where they don't want to have a problem with them. So they want to regulate, like, if people make specific claims in titles or thumbnails, even if they don't in the video and they make it very clear and you put tons of disclaimers and everything else, YouTube doesn't want to deal with that. So they are taking down channels that do that. I think they have, like, automated algorithms that do that. So you can do this the right way though. For example, channels like Zinni Studio, which is completely faceless, teaches how to make money with YouTube and she's doing it the right way in my opinion. She has an AI avatar and she just teaches people how to use different AI tools to make money and she frames it in the context of like online business instead of you will become a millionaire overnight if you watch this video. Don't do videos like that. So there's a right way of doing the make money online niche, but make it more focused on the tutorial aspect of it. Another great thing you can do is to create a custom GPT of the YouTube terms and service. This is what I personally did. and then you can put any video ideas or thumbnails that you're thinking of into that, and you can see if it'll break any terms. The next niche is relationship advice and self-improvement. Great example of channel in this that's doing a specific sub-niche is The Stoic Journal, which talks about tenets of stoicism and what different stoic teachers throughout the ages have taught. And it's an amazing sub-niche, tons of people are interested in it, and I would go into something specific like that. For example, if you're doing relationships, you could talk about, for example, how to get a girlfriend in your early 20s. Or get a boyfriend or whatever. Or you could talk about how to find a wife in your 50s or 60s. When you call it to specific people like that, it works so well. And that's one of the broad themes that you're probably noticing throughout this video is to focus on a specific demographic when it comes to any of these niches. The next niche is technology tutorials and software reviews. I have a student, Curry, he makes $10,000 a month just promoting some different software from his videos and it's recurring as well. So people, you know, buy these software through his affiliate links and he only promotes a couple different ones. and then they're paying monthly and he gets a commission for that monthly for life, depending on the affiliate program that you sign up for. And the videos are super easy to make. You can easily just use OBS to record your screen, show how to use these different software, do a full tutorial, for example, how to use VidAI step-by-step tutorial, then put your affiliate link in the description for VidAI and then get 33% commissions for life. Now this is the most important thing I'm gonna say in this entire video. The niche alone is not enough because there is a fourth and final paradox, which is that two people can start a channel within the same exact niche and get completely different results. One person's channel absolutely takes off, whereas the other person's channel gets zero views within the same exact niche. It can even be the same type of content, but completely opposite outcomes. The difference is not the niche. So you're probably asking, Matt, what is the difference? And it's something that nobody knows about and that nobody talks about. Now I'm gonna reveal that to you right now. All you have to do is simply click this video next to me right here, and I'm gonna show you what that is that nobody talks about that allows you to blow up a channel. And it's in the first few secrets within this video right here. This is a must-watch. It'll be the best investment of an hour into your YouTube strategy ever. Click it, watch it, check it out. My name is Matt Parr, and I'll see you there.