A playbook for becoming the biggest channel in your niche

We just took a channel and grew long form viewership by 3,900%. From 30k views/video to 3 million. The highest in the entire niche.

How?

We have a playbook. I call it the 'category winner'' playbook.

It's goal is simple: To grow a channel into the biggest in it's niche. In 2 years.

Here's the 5 steps so you can do the same:

1. It's not about the niche, it's about picking the sub-niche you conquer first.

First let me actually share the channel with you. It's Forrest Galante. The niche = wildlife.

We signed him as a client back in 2023, he was known for podcast appearances and his tv shows, but was struggling to hit on youtube.

Big issue. He was going after everything.

If you want to conquer an entire niche... you don't start with the entire niche. It would be easy to think that wildlife is already 'niche enough' - but the average person greatly underestimates how vast YouTube is.

Every major niche can be broken into multiple sub-niches.

Just look at wildlife for example:

Sub niches within wildlife niche, orange = ones we selected to pursue

The strategy is starting in one or two and expanding how broad you are as the channel scales.

A lot of conventional advice is to go as broad as possible from the start.

No. Pick small battles first.

On Forrest's channel we targeted extinct animals, dangerous animals and reptiles.

2. Implementing a niche dominating posting schedule

Next comes the eternal question.

How often should I post?

YouTube is far too nuanced to think that any one schedule is the only way… but in my years of doing this, one optimal schedule has emerged.

Here it is.

• Objective: Become biggest channel in the niche
• 1 weekly long form video (With 5 skips per year)
• 15-40 minute videos
• 3+ shorts per week

This gives you a reasonable 7 day turnaround to make a good video over 15 minutes.

You get 5 vetos per year... i.e holidays, or if a video is just not up to scratch... I never want to post a bad video just to hit a schedule.

With Forrest we ruthlessly committed to this prescription.

3. Format searching - with fast double down

Once you have your sub-niche and your schedule locked, you have to ruthlessly test ideas to find your formats.

Formats grow channels. When I look at the channels I have grown from scratch in the last few years, usually 70%+ of their growth comes from 1 or 2 ideas built into formats.

People sleep on this. It's helpful to think of a channel as a 'show' and not a 'tv channel' sometimes.

With Forrest, we tested and tested.

We found two formats that hit.

Two formats that contributed to over 75% of long form growth

The basic strategy =

• Try idea
• It works? Do it again as quickly as you can. 'I don't want to saturate the audience' is a myth.
• It doesn't have to bang, if it gets 2x your average view count that is enough signal.
• If it works two times in a row, you have a winning format

You need to do everything you can to discover these formats for your channel as fast as possible, and when you do... milk them.

Even today as the biggest channel in the niche, over 50% of uploads are private tours or extinct listicles.

People overestimate viewers appetite for novelty, and underestimate their appetite to watch more of the thing they already like.

4. Making the TV play in 2026

For over a decade people have been saying YouTube is the new TV.

In 2026, it's finally a reality.

As the graph shows above, TV has emerged as our clients' biggest device type. By a wide margin. I don't think this is a surprise... but how do we actually take advantage?

Here's three ways we have rode this wave:

1. TV rewards longer videos: We've found the optimal length for maximizing TV viewership is over 20 minutes.
2. Slower pace with deeper storytelling: Investing in depth and story is paying off (finally some might say) - the days of super fast editing and cutting out every slower moment are fading.
3. Production value matters more now: People do not tolerate on TV what they would on mobile. Video quality, good sound, solid lighting. We invest here.

Forrest's rise to dominating the wildlife niche was helped by prioritizing TV while others stayed stuck in the mobile mindset.

5. Staying in the game, the hardest step

Graph showing monthly long form viewership for forrest, rounded to nearest 1m

I was recently sitting down with a friend of mine who has 10m subscribers in the food niche.

We both agreed on one very simple principle. The way you win long term on YouTube is by staying in the game. It's easy to dismiss this, but look at the graph above.

When you zoom out the drops in viewership seem like little speed bumps... but in the moment they feel like full on disasters.

Going from 4m views/month back to 2m views, finally breaking 10m views/month only to drop back down by almost half.

Most people quit at these moments.

The hardest part isn't the lack of traction in the early days. The hardest part is not giving up when you have had traction and it feels like it's slipping away.

We have helped grow Forrest by 3,900% - but it was not straight up and to the right.

We stayed in the game.

I hope this article was interesting, please consider sharing it if it helped.