The cursor hovers, a tiny, blinking judgment over the word ‘Publish.’ Your heart rate is doing that stupid thing again, the thumping you can feel in your jaw. You’ve rehearsed the apology 18 times. ‘I know this is a little different…’ it starts, a preemptive shield against the comments you can already see: ‘Stick to the pottery videos,’ ‘Unsubscribed,’ ‘This isn’t what I came here for.’ The video is about skateboarding. Your channel, your beautiful, successful, suffocating channel with 238,000 subscribers, is about 18th-century French pottery. And in this moment, you are a traitor.
We need to talk about the advice.
The first commandment of the creator economy, handed down from every guru on every platform: ‘Niche down.’ They tell you it’s the only way to get traction, to signal to the algorithm what you’re about. The algorithm, they explain, is a powerful but simple-minded god. It needs to place you in a box. If you make videos about pottery, you go in the Pottery Box. If you then make a video about skateboarding, the god gets confused. It panics. It stops showing your work to people. And in a world where visibility is oxygen, the algorithm’s confusion is a death sentence. And you know what? For a while, they’re right. It works. It’s the fastest way to get your first 8 subscribers, then 88, then a thousand.
“I once gave a friend this exact advice. He was a phenomenal artist, a man who could paint a thundercloud and make you feel the barometric pressure drop. He wanted to build an audience online. ‘Pick one thing,’ I said, channeling the wisdom I’d absorbed. ‘Just one. How about… old barns?’ He hated it. But he did it. He became the Old Barn Guy. His channel grew. He got 48,000 followers. And he was miserable. He confessed to me over coffee one day that the sight of weathered planking made him physically ill. He wanted to paint portraits, cityscapes, anything but another decaying structure. I had helped him build a beautiful prison.”
This is the great, unspoken poison of the creator economy.
It rewards specialization to a degree that is fundamentally inhuman. We are not single-interest organisms. Our curiosity is meant to wander. The very process of becoming an expert in one thing often sparks fascination in another, completely unrelated field. This is how innovation happens. But the platform doesn’t care about innovation. It cares about reliable data points. It wants you to be a predictable content-producing unit.
I was talking to my grandmother about this the other day, trying to explain how the internet works. I told her it’s like she owned a bakery famous for its sourdough bread. People line up for it. Then one Tuesday, she gets a wild urge to make croissants. They’re magnificent. But when she puts them in the window, her regulars get angry. ‘Where’s the sourdough? We came for sourdough!’ The new people walking by don’t know if this is a sourdough bakery or a croissant bakery, so they just keep walking. Her reputation, which she thought was for being a great baker, was actually for being a predictable sourdough supplier. The internet is that, but amplified by a factor of 88 million.
Consider Oscar J.-P.
He’s a fire cause investigator. I met him years ago for a story I was working on. His job is to walk into a charred, skeletal ruin and read the story of the last few moments. You might think his niche is ‘fire.’ But that’s not it. To be good at his job, he has to be an expert in a dozen fields that have nothing to do with each other. He understands electrical wiring, fluid dynamics, the structural integrity of different building materials, human psychology under duress, and the chemical composition of 88 different household accelerants. If Oscar had ‘niched down’ to only understanding fires started by faulty wiring, he’d be useless at a scene involving arson. His value, his entire expertise, comes from the intersection of his varied knowledge. He is powerfully, necessarily, anti-niche.
We’ve been convinced that to be a professional, we must be Oscar, but only the part that knows about faulty wiring.
We must amputate the other parts of ourselves for the sake of a clean marketing message. But the audience isn’t the problem. We blame them, we fear their rejection, but they are only reacting to the system they’re in. The system has trained them to expect a specific product from a specific person. What we need isn’t a more disciplined adherence to a niche; it’s a different relationship with the people who follow us. A relationship built not on topic, but on trust and personality.
This is the shift towards the ‘superfan.’
The superfan doesn’t follow you for 18th-century pottery. They follow you for *you*. They are interested in your perspective, your passion, your unique way of explaining things. If you are authentically excited about skateboarding, they are, at a minimum, curious to see what you have to say about it. They might not all love it. Your views might dip by 18%. But the ones who stay are the foundation of a real, sustainable career, not just an algorithmic fluke. They’re the ones who support you directly, because the connection is personal. It’s a much more resilient model. I’ve seen creators with global audiences build entire careers this way, where fans from all over want to be part of the journey. A creator I know who teaches English has a huge following in the Middle East, and his fans are constantly asking for ways to support him beyond just watching ads. For his audience asking about شحن تيك توك, it’s not about the transaction; it’s about participating in his creative freedom. It’s that freedom that allows him to make a video about Shakespeare one day and the history of coffee the next, without apology.
Of course, it’s terrifying to make that leap. It feels like stepping off a cliff. And honestly, niching down isn’t entirely bad advice; it’s just incomplete. It’s a boat to get you away from the shore, but you’re supposed to abandon it once you reach the open ocean. Instead, we’re told to stay in the boat forever, going in circles. I’m starting to think the real skill isn’t finding a niche. The real skill is orchestrating a graceful escape from the one that made you successful in the first place. This is a messy, human process. There is no 8-step guide for this. It involves slowly introducing new threads, testing the waters, and being willing to lose the followers who were only there for the ‘sourdough.’
The apology, that ‘I know this is different’ intro, is a symptom of the disease.
It’s a creator asking for permission to be a whole person. It’s a plea to an algorithm and an audience conditioned by that algorithm. But you can’t build a life’s work on a foundation of apology. You build it on the messy, contradictory, evolving truth of who you are. The truth is, you contain multitudes. You are the pottery expert and the novice skateboarder. You are the fire investigator who understands both chemistry and human nature. You are the baker of sourdough and, on an inspired Tuesday, of magnificent croissants. The risk isn’t that you’ll confuse the algorithm. The risk is that in trying to please it, you’ll prune yourself down to nothing.