What business should I start if I'm good at YouTube?

Is YouTube still a good place to build a business today?

Yes. YouTube is currently one of the strongest places to build a business because both its audience and its commercial value are still growing.

Alphabet’s latest quarterly results are useful here. YouTube advertising revenue reached about $11.1 billion for the quarter, up 13% year over year. That follows $40.4 billion of YouTube advertising revenue in 2025, versus $36.1 billion in 2024 and $31.5 billion in 2023. Alphabet also said YouTube generated more than $60 billion from advertising and subscriptions combined in 2025.

The more interesting change is where people watch. Nielsen recently measured YouTube at 13.8% of all U.S. television viewing, the highest share among media distributors. YouTube also says people now watch more than one billion hours on TVs every day. We are well beyond the period when YouTube mainly meant teenagers watching clips on phones.

That makes the platform much more useful for businesses that need time to explain something. A software comparison, a home-renovation breakdown, an investment analysis or a 25-minute tutorial can hold attention in a way most social feeds cannot.

There is another fresh sign of how commercial YouTube has become. The platform opened its Shopping affiliate programme to eligible creators with only 500 subscribers in 2026, after saying Shopping GMV had grown fivefold year over year and more than 500,000 creators had joined the programme globally.

So yes, we would still build on YouTube today. The opportunity is broader now because YouTube sits somewhere between a search engine, a television network, a podcast platform and a shopping channel.

What are we really good at if we’re good at YouTube?

If we are good at YouTube, our most valuable skill is usually customer acquisition rather than video production itself.

A strong YouTube operator knows how to find subjects people care about, package an idea into a title and thumbnail, win the click, hold attention, explain something clearly and build familiarity with people who have never met us.

Put those skills together and we already have much of a marketing funnel.

That becomes especially powerful when viewers are researching something expensive. Someone searching for “best CRM for a 20-person agency,” “how much does it cost to renovate a kitchen?” or “how to reduce Amazon PPC spend” is revealing a problem and often some buying intent at the same time.

YouTube can then move that person much further than a typical social post. A viewer might discover us through one video, watch three more over the next week, see us explain the same problem from several angles and eventually contact us.

The long shelf life helps too. In 2026, YouTube said roughly 40% of video views happen more than a month after publication. A genuinely useful video can keep introducing customers to us long after the launch spike disappears.

That is the business advantage we should exploit. Being good at YouTube gives us a way to create demand repeatedly without paying for every impression.

Should I just make money from YouTube ads?

Usually no. YouTube ads can become excellent extra income, but building the whole business around AdSense forces us to chase far more views than most other models require.

YouTube currently pays creators 55% of net watch-page advertising revenue. Shorts use a different system, with creators receiving 45% of the revenue allocated to them from the Shorts creator pool. Channel memberships, Super Chat, Super Stickers and Super Thanks currently pay creators 70% of net revenue under YouTube’s Commerce Product Module.

Those are decent economics once an audience is already large. The difficulty is scale.

One client paying us $3,000 is worth $3,000 whether the video that generated the lead received 4,000 views or 400,000. Advertising requires the viewing itself to become enormous before the same content creates comparable revenue.

The latest YouTube Partner Program changes reinforce that point. From 2027, new creators seeking ad and Premium revenue sharing will need 8,000 qualified long-form watch hours in the previous year or 20 million qualified Shorts views over 90 days, alongside 1,000 subscribers. Shorts creators will also need 10 million qualified Shorts views over the previous 90 days to participate in the monthly Shorts creator pool.

Existing YPP creators are handled differently, and earlier monetization features such as Shopping and fan funding keep lower thresholds. Still, YouTube is clearly asking creators to produce sustained viewing before direct platform payouts become the centre of the business.

We would happily collect AdSense from videos we already want to make. We just would not choose advertising as the reason the company exists.

Are YouTube Shorts enough to build a business now?

Shorts are currently incredible for reach, but we would mainly use them to create discovery and send people deeper into the business.

The scale is hard to overstate. YouTube now reports more than 200 billion Shorts views per day.

Yet a Shorts view and a qualified customer are completely different things. Someone can swipe through a video in seconds, enjoy it and never remember who made it. A person watching 18 minutes of a detailed tutorial has made a much larger commitment.

YouTube itself is separating these behaviours more clearly. Its upcoming monetization rules require 10 million qualified Shorts views over 90 days for monthly access to the Shorts creator revenue pool. The platform also changed how headline views are counted across formats in 2026: a view can now register when playback starts, while monetization and YPP eligibility continue to rely on engaged or qualified viewing measures.

That makes raw Shorts view totals even less useful when evaluating a business.

We would use Shorts aggressively when they help us test topics, reach new viewers or extract strong moments from longer content. Then we would move interested people toward long-form videos, email, a product page, a consultation or another place where the commercial relationship can deepen.

A business that needs constant Shorts virality is fragile. A business that occasionally acquires thousands of new potential customers through Shorts has a very useful distribution channel.

Why is long-form YouTube so good for selling expensive things?

Long-form YouTube works unusually well for expensive purchases because buyers get enough time to decide whether they trust our judgment.

That becomes obvious in categories where people research before spending.

Someone buying a $4,000 camera may watch three detailed comparisons. A company considering a $30,000 software contract may watch implementation walkthroughs. A homeowner planning a six-figure renovation may spend hours watching contractors explain budgets, mistakes and materials.

YouTube increasingly fits this slower behaviour. TV is now its largest viewing environment by watch time in the United States according to YouTube, and Nielsen's latest measurements continue to put the platform ahead of every other U.S. media distributor in television viewing.

Podcasts point in the same direction. YouTube says podcast content has more than one billion monthly viewers, while Edison Research found YouTube was the most commonly used service among weekly U.S. podcast consumers in its 2025 survey, ahead of Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

Those people are already comfortable spending 20, 40 or 90 minutes with one person.

That is an excellent environment for businesses where a customer needs explanation before buying. The more expensive or complicated the decision, the more valuable strong long-form content can become.

Is a productized service the best first business if I’m good at YouTube?

For most people starting from zero, yes. A narrow productized service gives YouTube skill the fastest path to meaningful revenue because a small number of customers can support the business.

Imagine we make videos for independent dental-practice owners. We could cover unused chair capacity, implant leads, treatment-plan acceptance, hygienist recruitment, no-shows and local patient acquisition.

Behind those videos, we sell one specific result.

Maybe we help practices generate qualified implant consultations for $3,000 per month. Four customers create $12,000 in monthly revenue. At $5,000 per customer, three clients already produce a $15,000 monthly business.

That changes the YouTube game completely. We can build around 10,000 highly relevant viewers rather than trying to entertain a million random ones.

The service also gives us something extremely valuable: direct exposure to customers. After working with 10 or 20 clients, we start seeing the same complaints, workflows, objections and repetitive work. Those repetitions tell us what could eventually become software, training, templates, data or a more standardized offer.

The best starting model therefore depends partly on what expertise we already possess, but services usually give us the shortest route from audience to evidence.

Model	What 10 customers can represent	Main advantage	Main weakness
$5,000 project	$50,000	Very few buyers needed	Revenue can be uneven
$3,000/month service	$30,000 monthly	Recurring high-value revenue	Delivery eventually needs a team or system
$500 course	$5,000	Easy to scale delivery	Much more volume needed
$50/month membership	$500 monthly	Recurring revenue	Retention must stay strong
$25 affiliate commission	$250	Very simple delivery	Weak control over economics

Should I start a YouTube agency or sell expertise in another niche?

If our strongest knowledge is YouTube itself, a specialized YouTube agency can work very well; if we already understand another valuable industry, we would rather use YouTube to sell into that industry.

This distinction is important.

Someone who has repeatedly grown channels may have a real product to sell: strategy, thumbnails, production, scripting, channel management or content systems. A generic “YouTube agency,” however, enters a crowded market where clients can compare us with hundreds of editors and freelancers.

Specialization fixes part of that problem.

A company that helps cybersecurity firms turn technical expertise into YouTube videos that create sales opportunities sounds more valuable than an agency that “does YouTube for businesses.” The same applies to an agency focused on accountants, real-estate developers, law firms or B2B software companies.

The opportunity becomes even stronger when we know the customer’s underlying problem ourselves. An experienced Amazon seller who happens to be excellent at YouTube may earn more by helping brands fix Amazon advertising than by selling video editing.

Production work is also getting cheaper. YouTube now provides AI creation tools, idea support, automatic dubbing, title and thumbnail testing and increasingly sophisticated creator analytics. More than one million channels were already using YouTube's AI creation tools daily by the end of 2025, according to the company.

Clients will keep needing people who understand what content should exist, who it should reach and how it turns into revenue. Merely assembling the video will become harder to charge a premium for.

Can YouTube courses and memberships still make real money?

Yes, but courses and memberships work much better when the audience keeps asking us for the same outcome instead of simply liking our content.

The creator-education market has obviously become crowded. That says little about whether a good education business can still work.

What matters is whether people have a painful problem, believe we know how to solve it and can reasonably expect an outcome worth more than the price.

Colin and Samir provide a useful example. After years of content about the creator business, they launched Creator Startup around problems their audience already knew them for. Agency Rare Days, which worked on the launch, reported that the first cohort filled immediately and generated $100,000.

Memberships solve a slightly different problem. They are strongest when customers need something repeatedly: current industry data, deal flow, accountability, live workshops, professional networking, ongoing research or access to specialists.

A commercial-real-estate YouTube channel could sell a database and investor community. A cybersecurity channel could sell recurring briefings. A channel for independent restaurant owners could provide supplier benchmarks, operational templates and monthly working sessions.

Those offers can justify recurring payment because new value keeps arriving.

A vague “join my community” offer has a much harder retention problem. Likewise, a generic course built simply because a creator has 50,000 subscribers gives us very little evidence that people actually want to buy.

We would wait until the audience repeatedly tells us what it cannot solve alone. Then the education product almost designs itself.

Is YouTube affiliate marketing still worth doing?

Yes. Affiliate marketing is currently becoming more interesting on YouTube, especially when our videos help people decide what to buy.

YouTube lowered entry to its Shopping affiliate programme in 2026 to eligible YPP creators with at least 500 subscribers. That followed a period in which YouTube Shopping GMV grew fivefold year over year and the programme passed 500,000 enrolled creators globally.

The best categories are easy to recognize.

People naturally watch reviews and comparisons before buying cameras, laptops, software, home-gym equipment, tools, beauty products, outdoor gear and professional equipment. If a viewer searches for “Canon R6 III vs Sony A7 V,” the commercial intent is much clearer than the intent behind a general entertainment video.

YouTube has reported more than 35 billion hours of shopping-related viewing over a 12-month period. Its 2026 CEO letter also highlighted creators already driving millions of dollars of YouTube Shopping GMV.

Affiliate businesses have one built-in ceiling: someone else owns the product and controls the commission.

That is why we like affiliate revenue as both income and research. If thousands of our viewers repeatedly buy the same type of product, we have learned something far more useful than which video got the most likes.

Eventually, the obvious question becomes whether we should own part of the product margin ourselves.

Should I launch my own product if I already have a YouTube audience?

Yes, once YouTube has shown us what the audience repeatedly wants to buy.

The best creator products feel closely connected to the content.

Mark Rober built an enormous science and engineering audience and now sells CrunchLabs STEM kits through subscription. Nick DiGiovanni built a cooking audience and sells Osmo spices and hot sauces in retailers including Walmart. Alex Costa used years of men's grooming content as distribution for Forte Series hair products.

MrBeast shows the model at a much larger scale. Beast Industries now stretches across media, Feastables, analytics software, licensing and other businesses. Forbes’ latest creator profile estimates his gross earnings at $300 million over its measurement period and describes a company that has moved far beyond advertising deals.

The pattern across these businesses is more useful than any one creator’s revenue.

The creator watches what an audience cares about for years, sees which recommendations work, learns the language customers use and then launches into an existing stream of demand.

That is a much better position than choosing a random ecommerce product and hoping YouTube can force people to care.

Generic merchandise can still make money, especially for entertainment personalities. But if we want to build a company with a life beyond fandom, a product that solves something for the audience is much stronger.

Is SaaS the best long-term business for someone good at YouTube?

SaaS can eventually become the strongest business here, but we would usually discover the software idea through customers before building it.

The appeal is clear. Software can create recurring revenue, serve more customers without matching that growth with headcount and eventually acquire users from places beyond our personal audience.

YouTube is also perfect for demonstrating software.

Imagine we run a channel about Amazon advertising. We initially sell an audit service. After 40 clients, we discover that every audit involves the same process for identifying wasted spend. That repeated workflow is a much stronger SaaS idea than something we invented while brainstorming startup concepts.

The same pattern can work in property underwriting, recruiting, accounting, creator analytics, construction estimating, ecommerce operations or sales.

MrBeast's Viewstats is a visible example of the creator-to-software path: years of obsessing over YouTube performance eventually produced an analytics product for other creators.

The important part is sequence. A YouTube audience gives us cheap access to users, while service work tells us what they will actually pay to fix.

If we already know the problem deeply, we can move to software earlier. Otherwise, six months of customer work can save us from spending two years building a product nobody urgently needs.

Which YouTube niches create the best businesses?

The best YouTube business niches usually have expensive problems, frequent purchases or customers who do a lot of research before spending money.

Audience size can be misleading.

A general entertainment channel may need millions of viewers to generate huge economic value. A channel explaining ERP systems to manufacturing companies could create a valuable business with a tiny fraction of that audience because one customer may eventually spend tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The same logic applies to dental practices, commercial property, industrial equipment, accounting, ecommerce operations, cybersecurity, legal services, home renovation, high-end hobbies and specialized software.

We would look closely at the money moving behind the viewer.

Someone interested in swimming-pool maintenance buys chemicals, pumps, filters, repairs and sometimes an entire pool. Someone researching home solar may be approaching a purchase worth tens of thousands of dollars. Someone watching advanced HubSpot tutorials may work at a company already spending heavily on sales software and consultants.

Meanwhile, a huge audience interested in jokes or celebrity clips may produce much less obvious buying intent.

The sweet spot is a subject where we can make genuinely useful videos for years and where viewers regularly spend serious money trying to solve the problems we discuss.

That combination is much more valuable than picking a niche because its CPM looks high.

How many YouTube views do we actually need to build a real business?

We can build a meaningful YouTube-led business with surprisingly few views if the viewers are the right people and the offer is valuable.

Consider 10,000 relevant viewers per month.

If two of them buy a $5,000 consulting project, we have $10,000. Four active clients paying $2,500 per month also produce $10,000 monthly. A $500 course needs 20 purchases. A $50 membership needs 200 active members to reach the same monthly revenue.

Advertising works differently because the view itself has to generate the money.

This is why a niche channel with 8,000 subscribers can become a better business than a broad channel with 800,000. Subscriber count gives us almost no information about what each subscriber could eventually be worth.

These figures are illustrative rather than claims about normal conversion rates. The useful point is the order of magnitude: high-value services require tens of transactions, while low-value monetization may require hundreds of purchases or huge amounts of viewing.

Revenue model	Illustrative unit value	Units needed for $10,000	What YouTube has to produce
Consulting project	$5,000	2	Two customers
Monthly service	$2,500	4 active clients	Four customers who stay
Course	$500	20	20 purchases
Membership	$50/month	200 active members	200 retained subscribers
Affiliate offer	$25 commission	400	400 purchases
Ads	Varies by audience and ad market	No fixed number	Large recurring viewing volume

Should I build the YouTube audience first and sell something later?

We would start testing what people will pay for quite early, while keeping the videos useful enough that viewers never need to buy from us.

Waiting for 100,000 subscribers can waste years.

Suppose we publish 20 strong videos about warehouse automation and three logistics companies contact us asking for help. Taking one of those projects gives us useful information immediately: someone will actually spend money on the problem we discuss.

Comments and views cannot tell us that with the same confidence.

Early customers also expose gaps in our thinking. They show us what sounds important on YouTube but barely affects the business, what causes real pain inside companies and what buyers will pay to have solved quickly.

The content still needs to stand on its own. If every tutorial becomes a long advertisement, we weaken the very trust that made the channel valuable.

The better rhythm is simple: give away enough useful thinking that people can see we know the subject, then make it easy for the smaller group with a bigger problem to work with us.

We should validate revenue much earlier than most creators do. We simply do not need to turn every viewer into a sales lead.

What YouTube businesses would we avoid starting today?

We would be cautious with generic merch, broad social-media agencies, copycat courses and businesses whose only advantage is that we can push them to followers.

The underlying problem is weak fit.

If someone follows us for accounting advice and we suddenly sell generic energy drinks, distribution may create a launch spike. It tells us very little about whether the product has a durable reason to exist.

Creator businesses that keep expanding successfully usually have a much tighter connection.

Mark Rober's science audience naturally fits STEM kits. Nick DiGiovanni's cooking audience fits spices. Marques Brownlee's technology audience has led to product collaborations around the kinds of hardware his viewers already care about. Jesser's basketball audience supports Bucket Squad apparel and basketball culture products.

Forbes' latest Top Creators research makes the broader shift visible. Its top 50 creators generated an estimated $1.02 billion in gross earnings during the latest measurement period, up 20% from the previous year. More importantly for our question, many of the biggest names now operate product companies, studios, investment businesses, software or retail brands alongside content.

The creator economy is gradually rewarding people who turn attention into assets they own.

We would follow that direction from the beginning.

What should a YouTube-led business look like after three years?

A strong YouTube-led business should gradually earn more money from assets we own and rely less on whether the next video goes viral.

The first stage might be content plus consulting or a service. That gives us revenue and direct contact with customers.

As the same work repeats, we can standardize delivery. Certain parts become templates, processes, training or a fixed package. Margins improve because every customer no longer requires us to reinvent the work.

Eventually, one recurring problem may justify a larger product. Depending on the niche, that could become software, proprietary data, education, a subscription, a physical product or a specialized service team.

At that point YouTube still matters enormously, but its role has changed. It keeps bringing new people into an increasingly valuable company.

Current creator businesses show where that can lead. Forbes' latest list describes Mark Rober running CrunchLabs alongside a large media operation, Steven Bartlett building a broader holding company around his media reach, Rhett & Link operating Mythical as a multi-show studio, and MrBeast spanning media, consumer products and software.

Those are unusually large examples, but the same architecture works at much smaller scale.

A channel can attract 20,000 highly relevant people each month while a separate company captures the economic value behind that attention.

What business should I start if I’m good at YouTube?

Start a YouTube-led business around an expensive problem and sell a narrow service first; for most people, that is currently the strongest combination of speed, low starting risk and long-term upside.

We reached that answer because the alternatives require more from the audience before they become meaningful.

Ad revenue needs substantial viewing volume. Shorts can deliver enormous reach but weaker intent. Affiliate marketing can work very well, although we give away most of the product economics. Courses become much easier after the audience has revealed a repeated problem. Physical products and SaaS can create far larger companies, but both are safer once we already understand exactly what customers buy.

A service gives us that information quickly.

The ideal setup is an industry where one customer can be worth thousands of dollars, people already use YouTube to research the problem and we have enough expertise to publish genuinely useful videos around it.

We might start by helping dental practices generate implant patients, Amazon sellers reduce ad waste, cybersecurity companies build technical content, property investors underwrite deals, ecommerce brands improve conversion or manufacturers implement automation. The exact niche matters less than the economics behind the viewer.

Then we watch what repeats.

If customers keep asking for knowledge, we can build education. If they need access and fresh information, a membership or data product makes sense. If the same manual workflow appears repeatedly, software becomes interesting. If viewers repeatedly buy the same type of physical product, we may eventually want to own that product.

YouTube gives us the distribution advantage at the beginning. The long-term business comes from what we learn to own behind that distribution.

That is the model we would choose today.