How to find small YouTube channels that are growing fast (and what they have in common)

Big channels are bad teachers. MrBeast's next video will get 100 million views because it's a MrBeast video. You can't copy that.

Small channels that grow fast are the opposite: they have no audience to lean on. When a channel with 5,000 subscribers doubles in two weeks, the only explanation is that the topic, the format or the packaging works on its own. That's the signal a new creator needs.

To see what this looks like in practice, we used the Returbe database: we compared the subscriber counts of 2,631 channels between 1,000 and 100,000 subscribers over the last one to two weeks (October 2026), and converted each one to a monthly growth pace.

What "growing fast" really means

So the bar is lower than people think. Most small channels barely move. A channel growing 10% a month is already in the top fifth; at that pace, it triples in a year.

Examples of small channels exploding right now

Long-form channels (less than half Shorts), English, from our tracking in October 2026:

Notice the pattern: history and true crime dominate the list, the same niches that came out on top in our analysis of low-competition niches. And it's not only about volume: StickOrbit, LOSTNODE and Lumz Cinema post about once a week.

What fast-growing small channels have in common

We compared the 579 channels growing more than 10% a month with the other 2,052:

Four lessons:

1. They're young. Half of them are less than 15 months old. Fast growth is mostly a phenomenon of new channels that found a format, not old channels that suddenly woke up.
2. They publish a lot. Three times more videos a week. More uploads = more chances for one to break out.
3. They hit more outliers. Almost 1 video in 5 does 3× the channel's normal, versus 1 in 10 for the rest. Growth comes from those spikes: one video takes off and pulls subscribers.
4. Shorts help, but they're not required. The fast group uses more Shorts, yet every channel in the table above is long-form.

How to find them yourself (manual method)

You can do this without any tool. It's slow, but it works:

1. Start from a topic, not from YouTube's home page. Search 5 to 10 keywords of your niche and sort by upload date.
2. Keep channels under 100,000 subscribers with a video that has many more views than subscribers. A 3,000-subscriber channel with a 200,000-view video is exactly what you're looking for.
3. Write down their subscriber count today, in a spreadsheet, with the date.
4. Check again in 7 to 14 days. Compute the growth: (new − old) ÷ old. Divide by the number of days and multiply by 30 to get a monthly pace.
5. Keep the ones above 10% a month and study them: when did they start, what format, how often, which video triggered the jump?

Tip: Social Blade shows a subscriber history for most channels, which saves you step 3 and 4 if the channel is already tracked there.

How to find them faster

The manual method has two problems: you only find channels in keywords you thought of, and you need to wait two weeks to measure anything.

Returbe tracks tens of thousands of channels every day, so the history already exists:

• Breakout Creators ranks small channels by recent growth and number of outliers, with filters for niche, language, subscribers and Shorts vs long-form.
• Top Videos with a "max subscribers" filter shows the individual videos that are exploding on small channels.
• On any channel, the public stats page and the Chrome extension show subscriber growth and the last 30 videos against the channel's normal.

What to do with a fast-growing channel once you've found it

Don't copy the channel, copy the reason it grows:

• Find the trigger video. Usually one or two videos explain most of the growth. Look at the outlier score of the last 30 videos.
• Name the format in one sentence: "15-minute documentary about a forgotten company", "bodycam footage with a narrated timeline". If you can't, you haven't understood it yet.
• Check if it repeats. One outlier can be luck. Three outliers on the same format is a pattern.
• Look for the gap. If the format works but only two or three channels do it, there's room. That's how you find an undersaturated niche.

Methodology

• Source: Returbe database, subscriber counts read through the YouTube Data API, October 2026.
• Sample: 2,631 channels with 1,000 to 100,000 subscribers and at least 7 days between the first and last reading in the last 30 days.
• Monthly pace: (last − first) ÷ first ÷ days × 30.
• Examples: English channels with less than 50% Shorts; channels without a niche label or in excluded markets were left out.
• Limits: YouTube rounds subscriber counts (3 significant digits), so very small changes are invisible; a short window magnifies spikes. Use it to spot momentum, not to predict a year.

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