Niche too competitive for a review blog?

The best thing for you to do would be to get started and test it out. If you are saying there is a mix of ecom and forum sites on the first page then at least half of them you should be able to outrank easily and the other half you might not but you will never know until you put in the work.

Best of luck!

Seriously-what's the harm? Write a post a day about it for a week or two, we're talking a few hours of real work and see where your stuff lands. That'll give you an idea about the real relative competitiveness of the niche-more so than anything else you could possibly do.

More work....less planning!

As far as I'm concerned, there isn't such a thing as a niche that's "too competitive". The only question -- and this is true whether there is just one competitor or whether there are 1 million other competitors -- is whether you're able to offer something to your customers that your competitors cannot. If you can do that, you've got a chance at success. If you can't, you're almost guaranteed to fail.

Asking if a niche is too competitive basically amounts to asking whether you can create a mediocre website, hope that Google will send some traffic your way, hope that some of that traffic converts, and then further hope that (1) Google doesn't shift their algorithms around and (2) a new competitor doesn't emerge that blows you out of the water. That's a lot of hoping.

As for your site specificially, I personally find that most "review sites" fall into the category of not offering anything that the competition isn't already offering. Amazon, for instance, is chock full of reviews for all sorts of products -- reviews that are often (though not always) well-written, detailed, original and composed by people who actually have used the product rather than just someone who is just trying to make a few bucks.

What is going to be unique or better about your reviews that someone can't get on Amazon or other sites? Do you have specific expertise? Are you an entertaining writer? Are you going to design the site in a way that is more useful than what the competition is doing? Or is there some other way you're going to set yourself apart?

Again, to me the important question isn't whether a niche is too competitive -- it's whether you can beat the competition.

.

Is there any kind of "sub-niche" that you can focus on and still reach people? May be something to think about. Long tail keywords might be another option (multi-word keywords).