How to Find High-Paying YouTube Niches

If you want to earn more from your videos, one of the ways is to make videos in niches that simply earn you more per video naturally.

We’ve talked before about the most profitable niches, but it’s probably not a good idea to just pivot your channel to one of these niches, especially if you already have an audience that is expecting certain types of videos.

You don’t want to release a video about your favorite credit card, while your channel is all about playing Japanese anime video games.

What you need to do is research high-paying keywords that are related to your channel. My business has been living from advertiser money for almost 10 years now. I’ll show you here what I do to find our high-paying advertisers.

Want More YouTube Money? Go Where The High CPMs Lie

When you create YouTube videos, your videos become available for advertisers to display their ads. This means an advertiser has to pay a certain price each time someone watches their ad or clicks on it.

The amount they pay is determined by the competition (other advertisers) who want to show their ads on their videos. They have to fight each other and give the highest price (like an auction) so their ads can be shown.

The amount you get paid is represented by a cute little number referred to as CPM (cost per mille). Basically, it’s just a fancy phrase for how much advertisers pay per a 1,000 impressions of their ads. Many things will influence how much CPM a YouTube video gets, but it breaks down into two main things:

• The more competition there is = the more expensive it is to show the ad.
• The more expensive it is to show the ad = the more money you get as the creator of the video.

So you need to create videos that target a keyword with a lot of advertising competition.

What is a keyword? A keyword is a phrase that people type on YouTube or Google to find content recommendations.

The title of every video that you make and the words you say during the video are keywords you are directly or indirectly targeting:

For example: 

A YouTube video with the title: “Best USB Mic? AKG Lyra USB Microphone Review” is targeting the following keywords:

• Best USB Mic
• AKG Lyra USB Microphone Review

If you go to Google Keyword Planner — this is the tool that advertisers use to plan the keywords to target with their ads — you can type these keywords in and the tool will tell you how much advertisers are paying for those keywords.

Here’s the example:

Do Your Own Research: How to find more niches with high CPM

Knowing how to do this research yourself will allow you to find niches that make money, but that are closely related to your channel’s main subject.

First, go to the Google Keyword Planner tool and sign in with your Google account.

Then, click on discover new keywords.

Type in your keyword and choose your country.

In the results, what ultimately matters to measure how much CPM you might earn from a video targeting that keyword is the top of page bid:

This amount is NOT the CPM you get per se. 

This is just how much the advertiser has to pay just to display the ad once, or for one click (depending on their approach).

If we compare this to another niche that I know gets high CPM, you can see a huge difference in cost:

• Best short term insurance plans = $10.30-$22.68
• Best USB mic = $0.16-$0.58

“Best short term insurance plans” is way more competitive and valuable for advertisers than “Best USB Mic”.

Targeting the former with a video will give you higher CPM. You can be 100% sure about that.

For more examples of highly competitive keywords, Wordstream has compiled an awesome list with the most expensive keywords in Google Ads.

NOTE: this doesn’t mean that you get around $10.30 per view or anything like that. YouTube keeps half of what your videos earn. And most views are not monetized. For a view to be monetized people have to actually watch the ad or click on it. Most views you get won’t get you any money. Use this just as a sort of guide to compare which keywords are more profitable to target.

That’s it. Remember, with great power comes great responsibility. Don’t just make videos that pay more money blindly. Plan your channel like a sustainable business. You need to gather an audience. If you make high-paying videos but nobody watches you, it won’t matter if they pay a lot.

Creating a channel with content that people want to watch is the most important thing. Then you can start planning some higher-paying videos with the techniques you learned here. Good luck!