Breakout YouTube channels by niche

How this board is ranked

The number on the right of each row is the breakout score. It replaced an earlier ranking by raw views per subscriber, which had no time term: measured on this dataset, that older metric put videos with a median age of 134 days at the top (oldest 197 days), so it rewarded “a small channel once had a hit” rather than “this is being pushed right now”.

score = views ÷ √(age in days × subscribers) × engagement credibility, then divided by the dataset median, so1.0× is the median signal.

• Time (÷ age): a video with 10M views over 300 days and one with 10M views over 10 days are not the same event. Age is floored at 3 days so brand-new uploads cannot divide their way to the top.
• Audience (÷ subscribers): kept from the old metric — the point is distribution reaching past an existing subscriber base, not raw size. Subscribers are floored at 1,000.
• Damping (square root): the two factors are combined with a square root rather than multiplicatively. Chosen by measurement: between exponents 0.3 and 0.5 the top 20 overlaps 80–100%, while 0.75 and above degenerates into “newest wins” (overlap falls to 50%, then 20%).
• Engagement credibility: likes per 100 views against the same niche's median, clamped to 0.4×–1.5×. It exists because views alone can be bought: 666 of 2557 signals here sit below 0.6× their niche's engagement. Niche-relative because ASMR, music and documentary legitimately have lower like rates than tutorials. The clamp means engagement can never move a video more than 2.5× — it is a guard, not the ranking.

What this score cannot do. Every metric on this site is a stored capture, not a live counter, and there is only one capture per video — so “views per day” is the average since publish and cannot tell climbing from already-peaked. The score is also relative to the current dataset, so it changes when the dataset is re-scraped. Engagement is a proxy for authenticity, not proof: it demotes videos whose views look detached from their likes, and nothing more. Median engagement across the dataset is 1.08 likes per 100 views.

How this board is filtered

Nothing here is hand-picked, but it does arrive by two different routes — and both are held to the same metric floors, while only one of them takes a single video per channel.

• Keyword search: 913 entries (36% of the dataset) came from a fixed keyword pool run against the YouTube Data API v3 search endpoint. This route keeps one video per channel per run.
• Channel pulls: 1644 entries (64%) came from following a channel already in the dataset and taking several of its recent uploads. This route takes more than one video per channel on purpose — the deepest single channel contributes 33 entries, which is why one channel can appear several times on a board.

Floors are applied to a video when it is first ingested, and this board accumulates across rounds instead of being rebuilt from scratch each time. The dataset can therefore hold entries that would not enter today: currently 1 of 2557 fall outside at least one floor.

• Window: a 180-day publish window is applied when a video is first ingested, not to the board as a whole — this dataset accumulates, so an entry admitted inside the window stays after it ages out.2156 of 2557 entries are still inside 180 days today, and the oldest here was published 382 days ago. What the stored data cannot do is verify the window that was in force at ingest: each row keeps one set of metrics, the newest capture, and no row records the age it had when it was accepted. So this page reports the current age distribution rather than asserting the window still holds.
• Capture dates: the pull date is written by the channel-pull route only, so 1650 of 2557 rows carry one (2026-09-06 to 2026-09-07). The other 907 were found by keyword search, which records no date at all — not a missing value that used to exist, a route that never had the field. Where a date exists it is the first capture and is preserved across re-pulls rather than refreshed. Ages shown anywhere on this site are recalculated from each video's publish date at build time (2026-09-25), not carried over from capture time.
• Minimum views: 20.0K — below that, a video is too small to prove demand.
• Maximum subscribers: 100.0K — larger channels break out because of their existing audience, not because of the format.
• Entry floor: 20.0K views, 3× views per subscriber and at least 1 like, checked at capture time. These floors decide what enters the dataset; the breakout score decides the order.
• Minimum likes: 1 — zero-like videos are usually a metrics artefact.
• Shorts excluded: uploads under 60 seconds and titles carrying Shorts/Reels/TikTok hashtags are filtered out.
• One video per channel per keyword run: applied to keyword-search candidates only — channel pulls take several uploads from the same channel (see above), so a channel with 33 tracked entries is a legitimate outcome of the second route rather than a broken rule.
• Label and auto-generated channels removed: VEVO and “- Topic” channels are excluded (119 excluded so far), because their reach comes from distribution deals, not from a copyable format.

What this snapshot contains: 2557signals across 954 channels, with a median reach of14.2× views per subscriber, 3.4K/day at the median and a median view count of 340.6K.47% of the tracked videos are 15 minutes or longer, which is the shape most people get wrong when they assume this niche is Shorts-only.