Finding topics worth making a video about

A subject is not a topic

A subject is a thing you could talk about. A topic is a question with an answer someone wants.

The practical difference: a subject video has no natural shape, so it becomes a chronology or a list of facts. A topic video has a built-in structure — ask, complicate, resolve.

The test

For any idea, write down the question the video answers, in one sentence, as a stranger would ask it. Then check three things:

1. Would anyone ask this? If you cannot imagine someone typing it or wondering it, there is no demand behind it.
2. Is the answer non-obvious? If the answer is what everyone already assumes, the video has nothing to deliver.
3. Can you actually answer it? With specifics — names, figures, mechanism — rather than by restating the question at greater length.

Ideas failing (2) are the most seductive, because they feel like solid topics. "Why is the sky blue" fails it for most audiences. "Why the sky on Mars is blue only at sunset" does not.

Where topics actually come from

Things that contradict an assumption

The strongest source. Anywhere the true answer differs from the intuitive one, there is a video — the gap is the tension, for free.

Questions people ask badly

Forums, comment sections, and the "people also ask" style suggestions are full of questions asked imprecisely because the asker does not have the vocabulary. Those are underserved almost by definition, because content is written against the precise phrasing.

The second question

Take a well-covered topic and ask what someone wonders *after* watching those videos. The first question is saturated; the follow-up usually is not.

Specific instances of general phenomena

Not "how do bank runs work" but the specific bank, on the specific date. The general version has been made a hundred times; the instance carries the mechanism *and* has real photographs attached to it.

The "what does everyone else do" step

Before writing, watch or skim the top three existing videos on the topic and write down, explicitly: the stock framing, the same three facts they all repeat, the anecdote that opens half of them.

Then do not make that video. This one step separates a treatment worth watching from a competent restatement, and it takes twenty minutes. Competitor research covers doing it properly.

Build a list, not one idea

Research topics in batches and keep a running list. Two reasons.

First, per-video ideation is what stalls channels — the hardest part of publishing weekly is deciding what the video is, and doing that under time pressure produces the safe, generic choice every time.

Second, a list lets you pick the best of twenty rather than the first acceptable one. The quality difference between those two selection methods is large and compounds over a year.

Where to stop researching

When you can name two specifics a generic treatment would not contain — a named person, a dated event, an exact figure, the term practitioners actually use. That is the threshold for having something to say.

If you cannot get to two, you do not know the topic well enough to make the video yet. That is a research problem, and no amount of scripting technique fixes it.