10 Faceless YouTube Niches To Always Avoid (and 5 of the BEST)

YouTube is terminating thousands of channels right now, and most of them had no idea that they were even doing anything wrong. And the scary part is that a lot of these channels were getting millions of views. They were huge businesses before they disappeared overnight. My name is Matt Parr. I've been doing YouTube for a decade. I run a bunch of different channels myself. I've helped over 11,000 people start their own channels. And in that decade, I've seen that YouTube cracks down super hard on certain types of channels. So in this video, I'm gonna be showing you 10 faceless niches that you need to avoid at all costs. I made a video like this a couple years ago, but that was before AI completely took over. And I'm making this video to be an update to that because some of the niches that were working perfectly even just a year ago could now potentially get your channel deleted. And I'm not just gonna leave you hanging with what not to do. At the end of this video, I'm gonna be showing you the absolute best 5 niches that are working right now and that will into the future with the AI revolution so you can build a real and long-term business with it. Now, niche number 6 that I'm gonna be showing you on this list of niches to avoid is kind of personal to me because my channel almost got deleted being in this niche. I almost lost my channel, and I know that a lot of people watching this video are considering this niche, or a lot of people might already be within this niche. So make sure you stick around for number 6 because I'm gonna show you exactly how you can avoid making the same mistake that I did. So let's get straight into it. Now, the first niche to avoid might surprise you a little bit. You've probably seen tons of channels like this on YouTube getting millions upon millions of views, and you think there's nothing wrong with doing a channel like this. In that niche is true crime content, but only if you do it in the wrong way. You see, if you do true crime content talking about a real crime or a real event that has happened, you could potentially be okay as long as it's not too graphic and as long as it's something that advertisers aren't gonna want to avoid putting ads on. And I'll talk more about that a little bit later in this video, and that's incredibly important, so make sure you stay tuned for that. But in early 2025, a channel called True Crime Case Files was getting millions of views every single month producing documentary-style videos about crazy crimes that have happened. It looks super professional. The narration sounded legit. Everything about it seemed real. And what happened was they made this video about this crime that happened in Denver, Colorado. It was this horrific crime, and people started contacting the Denver Post asking why they haven't covered this story. And then they started investigating, and it turns out the crime never happened. The creator of the channel, they were just using ChatGPT to generate hundreds of different videos that never happened. And as a result, YouTube terminated this channel for multiple violations of their guidelines. Now you might be saying, okay, Matt, but what guidelines does this violate? Because at the end of the day, we go to movies, right? We watch entertainment that we know is fake, and that is the problem— that we know is fake. When you're doing something that could potentially involve real people, especially in real locations, and you don't make it clear that it is a scary story and that it is in no way real, that is when you can start having problems. And right now is a really good time to be thinking about this as well, due to the fact that YouTube is gonna be looking really closely now at true crime stories because they don't want to have potential legal problems or anything else. You can 100% do fictional scary stories on YouTube. I actually have a bunch of people in my communities who do that and make tons of money from them. However, you need to make it clear that it is a scary story. And even just saying this supposedly happened would be a lot better, at least in my personal opinion, than making a documentary-style video about something. And so this violated YouTube's misinformation policy and the channel creator lost their entire business. Which they could have saved if they just did true crime stories. But you might be saying the true crime stories wouldn't have gotten as many views, which in some cases you might be right, in which case he should have made it clear that it was a scary story. Now staying on AI, this next niche we're gonna go over is something that might surprise a lot of people. And that niche is faceless sensational entertainment. Now I don't know if this has happened to you before, but you might have been on YouTube and you see a video that looks like an actual movie trailer for a new and upcoming movie and you watch the trailer, it looks completely real, and then you go and Google it and the movie doesn't exist. And that was because that trailer was made purely using AI. And a lot of these trailers, they use real studios' names, real actors' names, and that's the problem. YouTube actually shut down a lot of these channels that were generating AI-generated movie trailers for movies that didn't exist. Because obviously Disney, Marvel, or whatever company is making these movies is going to have a massive issue if people are advertising movies that don't exist. And of course, YouTube, in an act of self-preservation, they don't want to have to deal with lawsuits, is just gonna shut those channels down. And it is totally fine to make movie trailers, for example, using AI. However, you cannot be using the names of the actual companies. You can't use, for example, actors who are actors in real life or any real thing that could cause an issue. You just have to think about it through YouTube's lens. If it causes an issue for YouTube, then it will cause an issue for you as well. Now this next niche is one that you might think is this is totally fine because everybody on YouTube uses clickbait, right? They use a thumbnail that's typically kind of a little bit of an exaggerated version of their video in an effort to get people to click it. Everybody on YouTube does this already and all the top creators do it. So why would this niche be an issue? Well, let me show you an example and tell you what the niche is. I don't know if you remember the whole P. Diddy trial situation thing, but there was basically a couple channels that covered this that made about 900 videos and that got almost 70 million views in just one year. And they were AI generating thumbnail of celebrities like Jay-Z, Oprah, Brad Pitt, Usher on the witness stand for these thumbnails with completely fabricated quotes. One thumbnail showed Jay-Z crying with this text right here. Another claimed that Brad Pitt testified against P. Diddy even though that never happened. None of the quotes were real, none of the events happened, and YouTube terminated 16 of those channels and demonetized several others, in which case they're not making any money anymore. And the niche is celebrity news. And the problem isn't the niche in general, it's what 99% of people within this niche do. Which breaks one of YouTube's rules known as deceptive metadata. Metadata includes your titles, your descriptions, your thumbnails, and while most people on YouTube do stretch the truth a little bit in thumbnails in an effort to get people to click, when you're doing that in a way to make people, actual real-life people or businesses or companies, say or do things that they never did, that again creates a legal problem for YouTube that YouTube doesn't wanna deal with. So if you do wanna cover celebrity news, it's a very viable niche. There's huge channels doing this like Nikki Swift, for example, but they use real images and real quotes and add genuine commentary. And now this next niche is someone that I actually know who is writing scripts for a channel like this that got millions and millions of views. They made tons of money from it. And then one day they woke up to find out the whole channel was deleted. Everybody working for that channel immediately lost their jobs. And that niche is news and political commentary. Basically, whenever something's going on, like for example, an election, it would make sense if you're a news channel, you wanna cover every little thing about what's going on in relation to that event. But when you're running a faceless channel, you might have a team, you might be using AI, you might be writing the scripts yourself, but you want to get as many views as possible. You might hire somebody who makes somebody say something they never said in a thumbnail. And if you use AI, it might mess something up. And so if you're doing a channel about news or political commentary, then you should either be doing all the research yourself to make sure it's perfect or having a really huge team to help you, which is why for 99% of people, I would not recommend this niche. And then you couple that with the fact that the news stories that go the most viral are typically the most sensitive for advertisers. You're basically playing a game on hard mode when you can just play it on easy mode and do one of the niches that I'm gonna show you at the end here. Because in this niche, you've got everything going against you. And of course, if this is your passion, if this is what you truly want to do, feel free to do it. I just don't think it's the best niche, and so many channels that I've seen have had problems within this niche. Alright, now this next niche has been around for years, and I've been warning people about this forever. I've seen people selling whole courses teaching people to make channels within this niche when maybe you make a little bit of money but then your channel gets taken down or it gets demonetized. And I keep seeing people fall into this trap over and over. And this is compilation videos with no transformation. So if you're unfamiliar, there's something on YouTube known as fair use. And this is basically a legal doctrine that states that you can use other people's clips from places online, from other YouTube videos within your own YouTube video but only if you add significant transformation, you make it different in nature from the original, and you make it educational. Now, this is not legal advice, but this is my understanding of this, and I run a bunch of channels that rely on fair use. But if you're running, for example, a TikTok compilation channel, animal compilations, fail compilations, you might be saying, "Matt, look at all these channels out there that are doing this exact same thing that are getting millions of views." If they can do it, why can't I? The thing that you don't see is in the backend of most of these channels, they're mostly demonetized, meaning they're making no money whatsoever, and some of the ones that are monetized, they have permission to use those clips. For example, you take a look at a channel like Daily Dose of Internet that sometimes doesn't really do any significant transformation at all, but you'll see that people actually submit their clips to be shown on his channel, and so therefore he has full permission to use those clips. And the problem isn't as much of YouTube having an issue with this as it is the original people who own those pieces of content having an issue and then filing a copyright claim or a copyright strike, or YouTube's automated system detects that content from another video and then claims your video automatically. And really, this is a commoditized type of content anyways. This is going to be so easy to just generate with an AI software, and you're not building any real brand IP with it. That I would not recommend getting into this niche whatsoever. The only exception that I might give would be if you have, for example, a character be kind of the face of your channel and then you review different videos and basically react to them and everything else. That could potentially be a situation where you might be okay. And another way you can do this is by making compilations of your own videos. This is actually a huge secret that not many people know about, but I've done this several times even just on this channel right here. Where I make a compilation of multiple different videos that I've done in the past and then combine them all into a super long official guide for, for example, getting monetized on YouTube. And that's combined with my videos about how to get 1,000 subscribers, how to get 4,000 hours of watch time, and a few other videos that were related to that all into one. So if you combine multiple of your videos to make a new video out of content that you already own, that could potentially be okay given that that content doesn't break fair use policies. And now it's time to get into the niche that I was telling you about at the beginning of this video that hits really close to home. This is the one that almost got my channel deleted, and that niche is make money online. And now before you close this video, hear me out. I'm not saying that you can't do make money online content. What I am saying is that you need to be extremely careful about how you do it. So midway through last year, I almost lost this channel you're watching right now when I got hit with 2 strikes on my videos, which I immediately appealed. And they were denied, and I was one strike away from this entire channel being deleted. And I wasn't the only one. Another huge channel in this space called HowToAI, they lost their entire channel. They got 3 strikes and their channel's gone. He was making over $1 million per year from that channel. Completely gone. And so you might be saying, Matt, why is this happening? Well, basically it's because a lot of channels in the make money online space make unrealistic claims about if you just watch their video, you're gonna instantly be able to make $1,000 a day. And even if you're teaching completely legitimate strategies, and even if you're genuinely helping people, if your packaging looks like every other type of get-rich-quick channel, YouTube's AI moderation systems are going to flag you. And that's the thing, this isn't a human reviewing all of these videos, it's an AI that looks for patterns. So one of the patterns I saw with my own videos, where I even just use the words or make a specific amount of money online, in the titles of my videos, those were the ones that got striked. And YouTube's not gonna just look at titles either. They're gonna look at your descriptions, and they're gonna also even look at your thumbnails. And so my thumbnails also had "make this amount of money online." I try to give a bunch of value within these videos, but the AI doesn't know that. It looks for patterns, and if your content falls into one of these patterns, you could have an issue. And so I actually privated every single one of my videos that had "make money online" in the titles. Or mention specific dollar amounts. I changed thumbnails on a lot of them. And a huge tip I also did was I created a custom GPT where I copy-pasted YouTube's entire terms of service into it. And now before I upload any video onto YouTube, I just run my title and thumbnail through it and it'll show me if there's any potential problems. Literally takes 5 minutes to set up and it could save your channel. And so you can absolutely do make money online content, but take a look at my channel now and see what I'm teaching is how to build a real business instead of doing a video 'How to make $100 a day online, best method.' Instead, I'm making sure that my content is more so along the lines of 'How to build a YouTube business.' And by the way, if you want me personally to help you navigate all of this, there's a link down in the description to book a free call with my team for my program Tube Accelerator, where you get direct access to me, my entire coaching team, the people who help me run my channels, and even my content team. So feel free to click the link down below, book your call, and I'd love to be a part of your journey. And now this next niche might surprise a lot of people, because you probably see videos within this niche getting millions of views and you think, what's the problem with it? This seems like actually very beneficial, helpful niche that helps lots of people and it doesn't seem to break any of YouTube's policies. So what's the problem? And that niche is meditation and relaxation videos and also affirmation videos. And the problem is what most people do within this niche, which is that they go download some music from the YouTube Audio Library, put it over some royalty-free video from Pixabay, and then call it a meditation video. And the problem with this is that it's not original enough. YouTube does not consider that to be original content. And a lot of these channels, as a result, they never get monetized in the first place. And also a lot of them don't really get any views. But let's say that you're super passionate about meditation, you want to help people with it, you want to make a channel around this, you 100% can do that. All you have to do is have a real original Meditation, guided meditation voiceover within the video, and then you can either be doing a guided meditation or affirmations. And if you're doing that, you can use some royalty-free music in the background if you want. But let's say you produce your own music, then that could potentially be uploaded to YouTube as a meditation music with no voiceover, but it needs to be original. Now this next niche is completely crazy. I had this guy in my community, he was getting tens of millions of views per month. He was doing incredibly good. In terms of views. However, in terms of the amount of money he was making per month, it was only a couple hundred dollars per month. So why was there that huge discrepancy between how many views he was getting and how much money that he was making? And that's two words: kids content. And why doesn't kids content make that much money? Another two words: COPPA compliance. COPPA is also known as the Child Online Privacy Protection Act. It essentially limits the types of ads that can be run on content that's made for kids, which will absolutely tank your CPM if you're making kids content. On top of that, you also have to label if your video is made for kids or not, and if you improperly do that, you could also have a problem and get a huge potential fine from the government. And a lot of features like comments, notifications, and personalized ads are not available for kids content. And if you're gonna be putting work into this anyways, I personally wouldn't put it towards a kids channel. Of course, you could argue you can sell things yourself, like you could sell merchandise and other things like that, and there are kids channels succeeding doing that. I just think there's so many better niches out there. I personally wouldn't even bother with it. And now this next niche, it should seem pretty obvious, but you'd be surprised how many times I see people trying it, and that is music and lyric videos. If you re-upload copyrighted music to YouTube, it's gonna be flagged immediately under YouTube's copyright system, and the money from that video then is going to go to the person who owns the music and not to you. You can run a music channel, it just has to be music that you personally yourself made, and whenever you use any music in any any of your videos, I recommend making sure that it's copyright-free music. Now, if you're using an AI video generation software like my software called vid.ai to help you with generating faceless videos, that can work incredibly well in a lot of niches, and we use completely royalty-free music for the backgrounds of those videos. And now it's time for niche number 10, and this one's a little bit less specific, and it's more of a rule that applies to every single niche on YouTube, and that is non-advertiser-safe content. And this might seem broad, however, it's actually very simple once you understand what advertisers want to put their ads on. And once I explain this, it's gonna make perfect sense. Essentially, what advertisers can do when they decide to put an ad on YouTube— and I know this because I run a bunch of ads on YouTube myself— is you can choose something called the expanded inventory or the limited inventory. And most people who are setting up ads on YouTube they just choose the standard one. They don't even put too much thought into this because you have to go deep into the settings even just to find this. So almost everybody does the limited inventory, and the difference between them is that the limited inventory is content that YouTube is certain doesn't include anything that isn't advertiser unsafe, whereas the expanded inventory are all types of content on YouTube that could potentially include swearing or violence or anything that advertisers wouldn't want to put their ads on. And so this means that if you do any of those things, that puts your content into the Expanded inventory, then your CPMs are going to be so much lower, and even worse, you could get demonetized. And here's some specific examples of what could get your content into the expanded inventory, which again is where you don't want to be, or get you demonetized entirely. And that's content about drugs, even if they're educational, graphic violence, anything related to weapons, inappropriate stuff for all audiences, content about controversial events like natural disasters or tragedies, and even topics like gambling, alcohol, or anything that a big brand like Expedia or Coca-Cola or Apple wouldn't want their brand to be associated with because they don't want to harm their brand. And so if you put yourself in the shoes of an advertiser and you think like them because you want to benefit your company as much as possible, you'll start looking at your content differently and producing content that's advertiser safe, which will make your channel a lot more money. And of course, feel free to do some of the niches that I showed you today because there are some right ways of doing them. And also feel free to do them if you don't care about making money. Maybe you're selling products or monetizing in a different way. But the thing is that if you're even monetizing in a different way, most of the niches we went over today are not good niches for selling products from your channels. And I say this from someone who sold over $10 million from YouTube. And so you might be saying, okay, Matt, then what is the best way to monetize and what are the niches that I should be doing? You told me a lot of what not to do. Well, here are the 5 best faceless niches that I actually recommend right now. Number 1 is personal finance and investing. Number 2 is health and longevity. Number 3 is AI tools and software tutorials. Number 4 is travel. And number 5 is self-improvement. And now if you go to secret number 3 at about 26 minutes into this video right here, I actually go a lot deeper into these niches and I show you a couple other really great ones as well. And I show you example channels that are crushing it within these niches. And then more importantly, in secret number 5 in this video right here, after that, I'll show you how to monetize it to the next level and actually make tons of money on YouTube. You would be insane not to watch this video if you haven't already. My name is Matt Parr, and I'll see you there.