About FormatDNA

Almost every piece of advice aimed at new creators is about picking a niche. A niche is a topic, and a topic cannot tell you whether you will still be doing this in six months.

The format can. The format is the repeatable shape of the video — and unlike a topic, it makes concrete demands: hours in your week, money for equipment, a level of editing skill, a willingness to be on camera or not, and a schedule you either can or cannot hold. Those are all checkable against your actual life before you start rather than after you have burned four months finding out.

That is the whole idea. Someone with four hours a week and no camera confidence will fail at a daily vlog and can succeed at a faceless voiceover series. It is not a discipline problem or a niche problem. It is a format problem.

There are thirty, and each is defined by what the viewer watches happen — not by subject. Gaming, cooking and fitness are niches, not formats, and they are deliberately absent.

Every format carries a boundary rule: a single question that separates it from its nearest neighbour. Those exist because the obvious failure of a taxonomy like this is that half the entries quietly collapse into each other, and a directory that cannot tell an explainer from a video essay has no business scoring you against both.

The model is published in full on the methodology page — including what it cannot do.

The obvious failure of a recommendation quiz is that the same three formats win for everybody, and it is invisible from the inside because every individual result looks reasonable. So every build enumerates the entire answer space — 720,000 combinations — and fails if any format can never reach anyone's top five, or can never be anyone's first result.

That check earned its place the first time it ran: one format was winning 22% of the answer space purely because it had the fewest requirements. The fix was to correct the underlying data, not to move the threshold until it passed.

No invented example channels. Every channel named here is resolved against the live platform, its name checked against what we claim, and its recent uploads read by a person to confirm it genuinely makes that format. A format with none signed off shows an empty section, and that is a publishable outcome rather than a gap to fill with plausible names.

No numbers that are not measured, and no format scored at 100% — nothing is a perfect fit for a person.

No advertising, no sponsored placements, and no affiliate links anywhere on this site as it currently stands. If that ever changes it will be disclosed on the page it affects, not buried here.

FormatDNA is built and maintained by one person, independently. It is not a company and has no staff.

Corrections are genuinely welcome — if a format is described wrongly, a boundary rule does not hold up, or a channel is listed that should not be, email [email protected].