Starting a Niche Youtube-like Site?

Honestly, despite what anyone tells you here (or anywhere else), you'll never know whether it'll work unless you try it. So then the question is whether it's worth trying. To which I'd ask you:

1. What is it about your site that is going to be better for gamers than YouTube already is?
2. How are you going to attract these people to your site in order to gain a critical mass of people?
3. How are you going to monetize this?
4. How are you going to pay for it?
5. How are you going to respond (and win) when you finally start to get traction and someone else (maybe even Google itself) sees your site and smells an opportunity to take what you've got and make it even better?

Personally, I think it's a long shot. A very, very long shot. Unless there's a particular reason that gamers don't like YouTube, or unless you've got some special technology up your sleeve that Google doesn't have, or unless you've got some amazing marketing ideas that Google hasn't thought about -- all of which also sound like long shots.

And speaking as a developer, to really do a site like this justice, you'd need to invest quite a bit in getting the technology right, both on the development site and the DevOps side. (And if you think you can just outsource this to some $10/hour development team... Well, good luck with that!) In sum, it's a tall order. Not impossible. But definitely a tall order.

All that said, maybe you do really have something up your sleeve. Or maybe you'd be content with a very, very small amount of traffic (and thus a very small amount of revenue). Certainly you wouldn't have to capture all of YouTube's gamer users to have a profitable site. But for my money, I'd look elsewhere. It's technically challenging and expensive and you're poised to compete with one of the titans of the internet. But maybe that motivates you. In which case... Good luck!

It has the potential to work, but it will be very hard due to YouTube currently owning the vast majority of the gaming market. Would you be hosting the video's on your site?

You could originally just have gaming videos from YouTube embedded into the website. Perhaps users could use features such as categories/tags or you could have a popular list to help promote their channel. You could then allow the user to embed their YouTube videos in appropriate locations around your website?

This would probably be the easiest to do and would take away lots of the costs associated with video storage websites (fast servers, backing storage). If you do plan on hosting all the videos, make sure to have a sizable sum of money set aside to cover the startup costs which could be quite high for a dedicated server. You may also need developers depending on your knowledge with web design. I could see this being created in Wordpress, there are already many themes and plugins which can help achieve your type of website.

Check out these themes:

http://themeforest.net/item/socialpl...-theme/5530973

http://themeforest.net/item/beetube-...-theme/7055188

Originally Posted by backlinkmasters Hello everyone, So I was thinking about starting a video community site (like Youtube) but just around the topic of gaming videos (Let's play videos, gaming news, what have you). I was wondering, do you think that niche video community sites can become successful? Obviously it would take a while to build up content and a user base, as youtube basically has a monopoly in this area. Just trying to do some market research and get feedback before I invest much money into this idea.

Is it something like Foodtube?

Maybe you can try and call your channel Gametube instead?

I was about to suggest the same as eKing: why host the videos on your own website?
Create a Youtube channel instead, post your videos there, then create website where you also post your videos with additional content, and link your Youtube videos to your website. This way you could generate traffic from Youtube instead of trying to compete with it.

Hi backlinkmasters,

I'm actually in the process of creating a similar gaming site for my 12 year old son. He is really into gaming, he watches them a lot on youtube and plays and records his own. I also notice the amount of views and interaction these types of videos get.

He has career day coming up for school however and says that he wants to be a vlogger so I'm working on getting the site launched for his career day.

Do I think that such a niche site can be successful... YES! several years ago I launched a site called reggaeandhiphop.com (no longer live) where i posted strictly reggae and hiphop related videos (I used a youtube clone script at the time don't remember the name)... it had alot of interactions but I got caught up with another project which I was much more interested in.

My objective is not to take over from youtube but to utilize youtube to create an interest in the website and find ways to add more to the site specific to the niche than what is being offered by youtube.

gl my friend