"Niche down" is growth advice misapplied to revenue

"Niche down" is growth advice misapplied to revenue

The instruction to pick a narrow niche is sound for audience-building and frequently wrong for earnings.

Context. Two distinct questions get merged: what grows an audience fastest, and what monetizes a given audience best. They have different answers.

Findings. RPM data segmented by topic shows commercial intent, not narrowness, drives ad and affiliate value. A broad personal-finance channel can out-earn a hyper-narrow hobby channel at a fraction of the audience because advertiser bids and affiliate payouts in finance dwarf those in low-commercial niches. 2025 affiliate-income breakdowns show effective per-visitor value spanning two orders of magnitude across verticals.

Caveats. High-CPM niches are also more competitive and harder to grow in — the narrowness advice partly compensates for that. Income data here is heavily self-reported and skewed toward successful operators.

Implication. "Niche down" optimizes discoverability. If the chosen niche has low commercial intent, you have optimized for an audience that monetizes poorly.

What we still don't know: the interaction between niche commercial value and growth difficulty is unquantified at the individual-creator level.