Can Creators Break Out of Their Niche?

We love a good niche. When you’re building a content business, establishing a niche creates a direct pipeline for potential ad partners to reach a specific audience with specific interests. It also fosters precise and valuable relationships between creators and their fans and those fans with each other, bringing about a community of like-minded people who can go deep on one topic.

Our niche is the business of creators. For Babish, it’s food. For Simone Giertz, it’s inventions. For Bailey Sarian, it’s true crime stories and makeup.

For Amanda Rach Lee, it was bullet journaling and stationery—until last week.

“I felt very stuck in a rut with my content,” Lee told us. “When people talk about content strategies, everyone says you need to find your niche and be consistent with it. That’s totally fine, I played that game for years but it really induced burnout.”

So she decided to make a big move—to pivot to a new niche.

Lee has been creating on YouTube for 10 years, uploading two videos a month in addition to regular streams. She started with DIY content, and she’s spent the past five years devoting her content and community to the bullet journal and stationery niche. She runs Shop Amanda Rach Lee, a store with notebooks, planners, and washi tape.

“Even though I know that I can continue playing that game and the numbers will come with it, I personally don’t feel fulfilled by doing the same thing every single day. And the whole reason I started YouTube in the first place is so I could do different things.”

So Lee is trying something new. She’s moved out of her apartment, and last week she launched The Drawing Board—an interview show that’s like Hot Ones meets Bob Ross, during which she draws with and interviews guests like the musician Laufey.

But taking on a new format comes with risks. The algorithm doesn’t know what to do with a video that deviates significantly from the content you usually post—and the audience can get equally confused.

The stakes are even higher when you have a lot to lose. Lee pivoted early in her career from DIY content to journaling. But making a significant content switch hit differently at 100,000 subscribers than it does now at 2 million subs.

“Now instead of pivoting a little sailboat, I’m pivoting a big cruise ship,” Lee said. “So it’s going to take a bit longer and it’s going to take more to get people on board with the change since I’m a bigger business now.”

But the effort could pay off. Reaching beyond your niche can add more runway to your career. For Lee, YouTube is the long game. She’s only 24, but she’s spent nearly half her life creating on the platform. “I don’t know if I continued with my previous niche how much longer I’d be able to do content for. So me pivoting is also finding a way to make it last even longer than what I would normally have,” Lee said.

It also helps reduce burnout. “I think there's this widespread theme of every creator feeling so burnt out now,” Lee said. “And I think it's because of that concept like everyone needs to just be doing this one thing every single day and grinding it out.”

So by pivoting to a new video format, Lee is working new muscles and trying out different production and editing styles. “We have to find a more sustainable way to do this thing that's supposed to be fun, you know? At the end of the day, we're just posting little videos on the internet,” she said.

She’s in good company: Other creators who have pivoted their content? Kirsten Titus, who became popular on TikTok for telling stories while cutting fruit. Now she’s expanded to lifestyle and comedy content for her 8 million followers.

There’s also OG creator Fred Figglehorn, who made comedy videos and a TV show with Nickelodeon in the early 2010s. Now he has a podcast riffing on pop culture.

For each creator, no matter what genre or time, changing course is always a little scary. But maybe that’s part of the fun. “There’s obviously risks that come with [reinvention], but for me, the bigger risk is feeling stagnant and not being happy with where I am,” Lee said.

Our Take

Niching down is great, especially as a tool for discovering your style and interests as a creator. But if you’re in this game long enough, you’ll inevitably want to reinvent yourself at some point.

Whether you’re Amanda Rach Lee or Conan O’Brien or Taylor Swift, the most successful pivots are rarely a full 180. They play off a part of the artist that feels familiar—for Taylor, that’s her songwriting. For Amanda, her drawing. And for Conan, his humor. By keeping those constants at the center and getting creative in their manifestation, creators and artists are capable of engineering careers and communities for the long game. And as a viewer, aren’t those careers the most interesting anyway?

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