What Are YouTube Categories? [Do They Matter?]

What are YouTube categories?

Now, this is one of those questions that many people ask. It’s just they have no idea. If you’re jumping onto the YouTube platform right now, then there are many legacy features that have been around for literally over a decade now that used to be much more specific for this platform that has slowly got less and less important over time.

Categories specifically put you in buckets based on what content you create, how to, style, business, money, food, finance, people, education.

I’ll be honest, I’m not totally sure what the list is anymore, mainly because it doesn’t matter.

Back when the platform was in infancy, you highlighted specifically what your content was about. If yours was comedy, then there would be specific areas on the site. You could go to only comedy videos and there would be specifically only people videos.

The way the YouTube algorithm currently works, it doesn’t matter. What you need to focus on is the title, the descriptions, kinds of your tags, and then the audience that it pushes out to.

There is no relation to the category you are in to the views that you get. If I was to switch this video from educational to gaming, I’m not going to get more gamers watch these videos.

Now, there might be something way back in the legacy algorithm that specifically recommends you against specific things, but it’s highly unlikely nowadays.

This machine is very powerful and very clever. So you shouldn’t be homing over the fact that what I do, ‘how to videos’, am I an how-to in style or am I an educational channel?

What you need to focus on is the content you create on a regular basis. If you stick to one niche and you’re not doing cooking on Thursday, knitting on Friday, and then skydiving on Sunday, followed by car repair on Tuesday, as long as you’re niched, then YouTube knows that’s your niche.

Because over time you have a hundred videos and those hundred video tags, all points into that kind of direction that say a hundred of your videos are all about cars. All of those tags would all be automobile based, and old cars, spark plugs and repairs.

It is very highly unlikely that out of those 100 videos, you’ve tagged it like a knitting pattern tutorial.

That’s one of the reasons why focusing on a niche can be so important and powerful mainly because it establishes your niche in your viewers’ mind, rather than YouTube in itself.

It’s just one of those questions that nags at you, because it’s still there. It’s still in the system and it hasn’t been removed.

Final words

It’s just like people saying, “Do you get paid for likes?”

I’ve got a video here, and if you’ve got a question about anything, no matter how small or weird or stupid, leave it in the comment section and subscribe, so you get to see the answer.