“Competitor” sounds nasty but it doesn’t have to be. In fact it’s almost always better to form a creator community in your niche because you can support each other, and even collaborate on future projects.
So I use the term “competitor” loosely and to mean channels that have similar target audiences in the same niche as you.
The term of course implies that you are competing against them in some way, in theory for your audience’s attention, but I think it’s more helpful to think of it as you both carving out a space on the same plot of land.
If your channels are well-done, they’ll be unique and interesting enough on their own to attract similar, but not identical audiences. After all, what someone likes about you won’t be exactly the same thing that they like about the other channel.
That’s why it’s so important to watch and analyze the videos of other channels in your niche. Making this a habit is a great way to get ideas for content, stay up to date on what’s going on in your niche, and to keep refining your voice and style into a recognisable brand.
Identifying Gaps & Capitalising on Unique Angles.
If your close/direct competitors are talking about a certain topic, you may feel that you have to do the same to stay relevant. But hold your horses for a second.
Even though all those channels may be talking about the same topic, they will be doing it in different ways. Analyzing these types of competitor videos is about evaluating the sub-topics they do or do not cover.
For example, I recently worked with a channel who was treading well-worn land after a pretty popular study came out in their field.
The videos we were directly competing with did a great job of summarizing their findings, but none of them really dug into the specifics of the study, or how their findings were a result of years of relevant work by previous researchers.
So, we dug into it.
I ended up realising that our competing video was factually wrong on multiple counts. As a result, we made a point to be factually correct and really dig into the source material.
Exercises like these may, at times, reveal an error in another video that you can capitalize on, but more importantly, it pushes you to find a unique angle on a topic that already exists which naturally helps carve out your little corner of the internet in a way that is true to your brand.
Generating Cross-Sectional Ideas
Your experiences will be very different to the experiences of another creator in your niche. So you will notice different things than they will. This leads to some truly fascinating ideas that wouldn’t have existed without your unique input.
I once watched a video about the representation of a certain character in a certain zombie-themed video game (if you know, you know). She got a really bad reception on release, including by me, but a few months after when I really sat with her I realised that I really loved the character so when I saw a video digging into this representation, I decided to watch it.
I realised that this person’s take was very very different to my own, largely because I read a lot of feminist theory that looks into how women are portrayed on screen.
This could birth an idea for looking at this character through the lens of feminist theory to break down how much of her negative reception was because of her actions in the story, or because of the way her femininity was portrayed.
This same cross-sectional process can be applied to any niche out there. The core of this exercise is to allow yourself to engage critically with other creators’ content, so you can turn the resulting analysis into your own videos.
Niche-Relevant Retention Structures
I’ve said before that retention is largely a simple concept. It’s just about keeping the audience engaged by delivering on what you promised in the hook.
However, how you promise and how you deliver changes depending on:
- Your niche
- Your video topic
- Your target audience.
Studying competing videos helps you identify what works for this audience in this niche. If you’re friends with a competitor, you could even ask them if they could share the retention graph of a recent video so you can see where they’re doing well.
This will help you extract the techniques they use which, along with your own insight and a strong knowledge of retention, will improve your videos by making them engineered to retain your audience in particular.
Make Friends not War
You don’t need to do this every day, not at all, but carving out a bit of time each month to see what other channels in your niche are up to is a great way to fill up your creative well in a way that is directly relevant to the content you want to produce.
That being said, comparison is the thief of joy, so go explore with curiosity, not jealousy.