Chapter 6: Finding Your Niche

Learning Objectives

After reading this chapter, you should be able to:

1. Explain how segmentation and targeting work and why a creator competes more effectively in a niche than in a broad market.
2. Apply the niche test (big enough, small enough, yours enough) to candidate niches, using true-fan arithmetic to judge viability.
3. Evaluate a niche-size claim by identifying who or what was counted, who produced the number, and whether it answers the sizing question at hand.
4. Write a niche statement that states the audience served, the work made for them, and the reason the creator can win there.

The Most Crowded Room

In early 2016, Andrew Rea was a 28-year-old freelance filmmaker in New York, recently divorced, professionally adrift, and working through a depression. He put $4,000 of camera equipment on a credit card, discovered that the kitchen was the only room in the apartment with space to test it, and filmed himself making a smoothie (Han, 2021; McGurk, 2022). “I’ve always wondered, ‘What does the food in film and television actually taste like?’” (Han, 2021). Not long after the smoothie test, an episode of Parks and Recreation was playing in the background. In it, two characters hold a burger cook-off, pitting an elaborate invented turkey burger, with papaya chutney and truffle aioli, against a deliberately plain hamburger. “And I thought, what would that taste like? So I tried, as painstakingly as possible, to recreate it to the best of my ability” (McGurk, 2022).

Consider the market he was getting into. Food was among the most crowded categories on YouTube, ruled by corporate kitchens with professional chefs, test facilities, and full production staffs. Rea had no culinary training, and his camera framing cut his own face out of the shot (“I had no intention of being anonymous. That was just where the camera happened to cut off!”; McGurk, 2022). The video was an experiment he wanted to post to Reddit for feedback (Han, 2021). It climbed past 20,000 views. The second episode followed ten days later, and Binging with Babish was born, a channel devoted to faithfully recreating the food seen in film and television (Han, 2021).

Five years on, Binging with Babish had 8.7 million subscribers. Bon Appetit, with a magazine and a test kitchen behind it, had 5.8 million (Han, 2021). By 2022 the count stood at 9.5 million, more than the YouTube audiences of Jamie Oliver, Nigella Lawson, and Tom Kerridge combined, and it has since passed ten million (McGurk, 2022; Binging with Babish, 2026).

Notice what Rea did not do. He did not become a better cook than the professionals. By his own cheerful admission he fails on camera constantly. He did not out-produce the corporate kitchens. He changed the contest. Cooking was a category he could not own, and television commentary was a category he could not win. But their intersection, the food you watch characters eat, was a territory nobody owned, and a skilled filmmaker who loved both could become its obvious source.

Notice, too, that the choice was not a guess. Rea had spent two years posting dinner photographs on Reddit’s food community, learning what that audience responded to, before he ever uploaded a video (Han, 2021). This chapter is about that kind of choice: how to divide a vast market into audiences you could serve, how to pick one you can win, and how to know whether the small territory you choose is big enough to sustain the venture you’re building.

6.1 From Everyone to Someone

In Chapter 5, you built an audience profile, evidence about who’s watching and what they value. The strategic question that evidence serves is where to compete, and marketing has a two-step answer.

Definition: Market segmentation. Market segmentation is dividing a large market into smaller groups whose members share characteristics or wants, so that each group can be understood and served on its own terms.

You already have the tools this requires. Segments can be cut demographically (the countable layer from Chapter 5), psychographically (the explanatory layer), or behaviorally, using what the observe lens shows about who returns regularly and who arrived once and vanished.

The essential thing to understand is that a segment is something you construct, not something the market hands you. The same market can be sliced by age, by motivation, or by situation, and no slicing is “true.” A segmentation is useful only when it changes what you make or how you market it. “Viewers under 25 versus over 25” sounds rigorous, but if both groups want the same thing from your work, the cut predicts nothing and decides nothing. “People who cook to relax versus people who cook to impress” may never appear on a dashboard, yet it might change everything you make.

Segmentation describes the terrain. The second step is choosing where to stand.

Definition: Targeting. Targeting is choosing which segment or segments to serve, and accepting that the choice means designing the work for them rather than for everyone.

The second clause is where students flinch. Designing for a chosen segment means your work will appeal less to everyone else. But that trade-off is deliberate. Targeting accepts it in exchange for work that lands better with the people it’s for. Chapter 5 showed that nobody can compose for a crowd of strangers, only for an audience they imagine. Aim at “everyone” and that imagined audience is no one in particular, and the work comes out generic. Targeting corrects this at the level of strategy.

For a brand-side marketer, the choice decides where advertising money goes. For influencers and creators, it decides what gets made. That is why this book treats targeting as a creative decision with marketing consequences rather than a question of where to place advertising.

One more thing before we narrow further. Choosing whom to serve is also choosing whom not to serve, and a segment could be chosen for a vulnerability to exploit rather than the value you can deliver. The difference is the ethical line Chapter 20 traces in full. For now, focus on the word “serve.”

6.2 Smaller on Purpose

A company with a salesforce and an advertising budget can target a segment of millions. You are one person with a camera, a keyboard, or an instrument. When you are the whole company, the segment you can serve well is much smaller. That constraint is about focus, not about how large the audience can grow. Rea’s ten million subscribers all come for the same specific thing.

Definition: Niche. A niche is a narrowly defined audience and the work made for it, a segment specific enough that a creator can serve it better than anyone serving the broad market can.

Large companies serve mass audiences by averaging. The corporate cooking channel must please everyone who cooks, so it cannot spend a week perfecting the props from one sitcom episode without diluting what its millions came for. That averaging is your opening. A group whose wants are specific enough is left unserved by that averaging, and a creator who serves those wants can become, for that group, the best available source in the world.

Candidate niches often come from intersections. Babish is cooking crossed with screen entertainment. Consider a knitting channel for competitive powerlifters, a personal-finance newsletter for freelance illustrators, or a history podcast about one city. Each crosses two broad territories and claims the overlap. Intersections work for two reasons. Each parent category is too big for one person to win, while the overlap is specific enough to own. And the person standing at the intersection of their own two loves brings a combination incumbents (i.e., the channels already serving the category) cannot copy without becoming someone else.

Two cautions before you commit to narrowness. First, a niche is an audience served, not a topic covered. Two ventures can share the subject “watch repair” while one serves working jewelers and the other serves the repair-curious. Everything from vocabulary to video length follows from that difference. Second, narrow is where you start, not where you must stay. Rea won his intersection first and expanded afterward, into general cooking instruction and eventually a multi-host channel. By the time he launched his second series he knew that roughly 80% of his viewers were young men aged 18 to 35, and he built for the audience he had evidence of rather than the one cooking shows might imagine (McGurk, 2022).

If narrowing still feels like aiming low, the economics of the internet say otherwise. In fact, the power of niches has a name.

Definition: Long tail. The long tail is the internet’s demand curve, with a few blockbusters at the head and an enormous number of narrow interests stretching out behind them, each small alone but vast in total.

The term comes from Anderson (2004), and you’ve already seen the shape. The creator income distribution in Figure 1.3 is a long tail, with a few stars at the head and nearly everyone else strung along the tail.

What makes a niche in the tail viable is distribution. The recommendation systems you studied in Chapter 4 route viewers into the tail because doing so pays. The combined attention flowing to obscure work rivals the attention flowing to hits. The same algorithmic distribution that makes your reach precarious also makes a one-in-a-million interest findable by the million people scattered across the world who share it (Kelly, 2016).

Anderson saw the consequence for niche audiences in Netflix’s early numbers. The service, he wrote, had “broken the tyranny of physical space. What matters is not where customers are, or even how many of them are seeking a particular title, but only that some number of them exist, anywhere” (Anderson, 2004). That sentence is the niche creator’s charter. Most creators are in the tail. The strategy question this chapter answers is not how to leap to the head. It’s how to make one specific spot in the tail workable.

6.3 The Arithmetic of Enough

How small is too small? In 2008, the writer and technologist Kevin Kelly published an essay that gave that question a number, and the number reshaped how working creators think about scale (Kelly, 2016).

Definition: True fan. A true fan is a person who values a creator’s work enough to support everything the creator makes. Kelly’s arithmetic says that roughly 1,000 of them, each worth $100 a year in direct support, can sustain a full-time living from creative work.

A true fan, in Kelly’s definition, is “a fan that will buy anything you produce”: the reader who buys the hardcover and the audiobook, the listener who drives two hours to the show (Kelly, 2016). The arithmetic requires three things of you. You must have at least 1,000 true fans. You must offer enough each year (e.g., new work, products, or a membership) that a true fan can spend about $100 supporting you. And the relationship must be direct, because every intermediary between you and the fan takes a share and raises the number of fans you need.

One thousand true fans at $100 each is $100,000 a year, gross. The 1,000 is an order of magnitude (i.e., a rough scale, not an exact count). At $50 per fan you need 2,000, and at $200, only 500. A two-person venture needs twice as many true fans. And true fans sit at the center of the audience rings from Chapter 5, surrounded by regulars and occasional viewers whose smaller support adds up around them.

Be clear about what the arithmetic says. Its lesson is how low the bar sits. A niche containing one hundred thousand interested people is roomy when the requirement is one thousand devoted ones, which is the quantitative reason “smaller on purpose” is affordable. It is not a promise. The $100,000 is before expenses. Kelly’s own follow-up survey found the model harder in practice than on paper. And cultivating a thousand direct relationships is itself demanding work.

Rea’s channel shows the arithmetic in action. Within the channel’s first eighteen months, Patreon commitments reached $10,000 a month, enough for Rea to quit his day job, and the average pledge was $5 (Downes, 2017). That comes to roughly two thousand direct supporters providing a full-time living, drawn from a subscriber base above one million at the time. Notice what those figures show. The true fans sustained the venture, but they were a small fraction of the audience. The rest filled Chapter 5’s outer rings, regulars and occasional viewers around a devoted center. Sponsorship money arrived in the same period (McGurk, 2022), but that was brand money routed through his reach, not direct fan support. Chapter 17 maps both roads and the different ventures they fund.

You don’t need Rea’s numbers for the model to work, and most student ventures won’t start anywhere near them. Let’s consider a creator you met in Chapter 1. Richard Skipworth’s cartoon illustrations serve the intersection of two territories, cartooning and sighthound ownership, and his venture runs on greeting cards, calendars, and prints bought directly by a passionate community that recognizes itself in the work. Sighthound owners are a one-in-a-million appeal in Kelly’s sense, and they found Skipworth. Nothing about that venture requires millions of anything. It is the true-fan idea lived rather than theorized.

6.4 The Niche Test

You now have candidate niches from the intersection method, a viability bar from Kelly’s arithmetic, and the evidence habits you’ve been building since Chapter 2 (claims need evidence, assumptions get tested, two lenses must agree). The chapter’s framework assembles them into three questions to ask of any niche you’re considering.

Big enough? Does the niche plausibly contain enough potential true fans? Run the arithmetic backward: estimate what the venture needs, divide by what a devoted audience member might spend or generate in a year, and ask whether the niche holds that many people who would become devoted. Use sizing evidence of the kind the Reading the Numbers box taught you to read.

Small enough? Can you become an obvious choice within the niche? Who already serves this niche, and what would make someone choose you instead? If your answer is “nothing,” the niche fails this question. It passes when you bring a combination of skills, taste, access, or perspective that incumbents would find hard to copy. This was Rea’s concern. “I was very worried I didn’t have anything original to say, because I’m not a trained chef. And take away the pop culture element, all that’s left is me” (McGurk, 2022). But the pop-culture element plus the filmmaking craft plus the fallibility of a self-taught cook was the combination, and no test kitchen could copy it without ceasing to be a test kitchen.

Yours enough? Does the niche fit the skills you hold (or will gladly build), the interests that will survive years of output, and the goals your venture exists to serve? Chapter 2 taught that a strategy is assessed against the creator’s goals. This question applies that standard before you commit. It also guards against the purely opportunistic choice. A niche selected only for its market size fails when the weekly grind of serving an audience you don’t care about breaks your posting rhythm. Chapter 11 returns to what a creator can keep making long-term.

The three questions trade off against one another by design. Widening a niche to pass “big enough” usually weakens “small enough,” and narrowing to pass “small enough” eventually threatens “big enough.” Intersections tend to satisfy both, and “yours enough” filters what remains.

If the pattern feels familiar, it should. This is the third small set of questions this book has handed you, after the value proposition’s three questions in Chapter 3 and the platform incentive audit in Chapter 4. It works the same way, as a discipline applied before committing, not a formula that decides for you. What the test produces is the chapter’s deliverable.

Definition: Niche statement. A niche statement is one or two sentences stating the specific audience a venture serves, what it makes for them, and why those people would choose it over the alternatives.

Look closely and you’ll recognize the value proposition’s three questions from Chapter 3: who is it for, what do they get, and why choose this. Like your audience profile, the statement is specific (a reader should be able to name a person it includes and a person it excludes), evidenced (the audience clause comes from your Chapter 5 profile, not from hope), and provisional (an assumption in Chapter 3’s sense). Once written, it enters the discovery cycle (assumption, test, evidence, revise), just as Rea’s first video entered Reddit as an experiment seeking feedback.

To catch a weak statement, try extending it with “so that.” “I make cooking videos for people who like food” cannot be extended without embarrassment, because it describes a category, not a niche. “I recreate the food from film and television for viewers who want to taste what the characters taste, so that the most vicarious pleasure on screen becomes something you can cook” extends itself.

The niche statement records the ground you chose. It does not yet describe how you stand on it. That’s positioning, and it’s the topic of Chapter 7.

Summary

This chapter turned audience evidence into a strategic choice. Segmentation divides a market into groups that can be understood on their own terms, and a segmentation is useful only when it changes what the creator makes or how they market it. Targeting chooses which group to serve and accepts that the work is designed for them rather than for everyone (LO1). At creator scale, targeting sharpens into a niche, an audience specific enough that one person can serve it better than the mass market’s averaging can, and candidate niches come from intersections of broad territories. The long tail is the economic reason such a niche is viable, since recommendation systems route scattered enthusiasts to the work made for them (LO1). Kelly’s true-fan arithmetic sets the viability bar, roughly a thousand devoted supporters in a direct relationship, which is deliberately low and deliberately demanding in its conditions (LO2). Numbers that size a niche come from platform counts, published surveys, and industry estimates. Each is read the same way. What did it count, and is that your question (LO3)? The niche test binds it all: big enough, small enough, yours enough, three questions that trade off against one another. Their product is the niche statement, a specific, evidenced, provisional sentence that joins your audience profile in the Unit 2 milestone and gives Chapter 7 its starting point (LO2, LO4). The standing lesson is Rea’s. He did not beat the corporate kitchens at their contest. He chose a contest they would not enter.

Questions for Discussion and Application

1. Food was one of YouTube’s most crowded categories, and Rea entered it with no culinary credentials. Why did narrowing the subject beat matching the competition’s strengths? And what did his two years on the food subreddit give him that no market report could?
2. Make two lists: (1) things you can do or make, and (2) audiences you belong to or interests you understand from the inside. Draft three candidate niches as intersections of one item from each list. Then identify the strongest candidate, run the niche test on it, and note which of the three questions it passes least convincingly.
3. Find one number that sizes a market or interest you care about (a subreddit’s membership, a hashtag’s view count, an industry report’s estimate). What did the number count, who produced it and why, and what would you still need to know before it could answer “big enough” for a venture of yours?

Semester Project

Write your niche statement: one or two sentences stating the audience you serve, what you make for them, and why they would choose it. Point to the evidence in your Chapter 5 profile that supports the audience clause, or label the clause as an assumption awaiting evidence. Then answer the niche test’s three questions in a sentence or two each: big enough (an order-of-magnitude sizing, its evidence, and what the number counts), small enough (who already serves the niche and what would make you an eventual obvious choice), and yours enough (your fit claim). If you are working from a comparable creator rather than your own venture, write the statement for them. No accounts, posting, or spending required. The niche statement is the second component of the Unit 2 milestone, and Chapter 7’s positioning statement builds directly on it.

References