Data report · July 2026 · Updated quarterly
We Scored 3,314 Digital Product Niches in 2026. Here Is What the Data Says.
Between March and July 2026, creators ran 3,314 niche scans through Kupkaike before deciding what to build. This is not a survey and not a scrape of the whole Etsy catalog. It is something rarer: 3,314 real signals of what independent creators were actually about to build, each scored 0 to 100 for buyer demand against competition. Three patterns show up clearly in the data. The first one is the opposite of what most sellers assume.
Strong-demand niches scored lower than moderate-demand niches: 46.4 vs 59.1.
Niches with strong buyer demand averaged an opportunity score of 46.4. Niches with only moderate demand averaged 59.1, nearly 13 points higher. Demand alone does not make a niche worth building.
Average opportunity score (0 to 100) by demand tier. n = 3,314 scanned niches.
The reason is competition. Strong demand rarely sits in an empty market. Of the 1,104 strong-demand niches in the dataset, 55 percent (604) were also crowded, the worst competition tier. High demand is visible to everyone, so everyone builds there. Moderate demand tends to sit in markets that are still winnable, and that is what lifts the score.
Competition, not demand, drives the opportunity score.
As competition rises, the average score falls in a straight line: 65.2 in low-competition niches, 56.2 at medium, 34.6 in crowded ones. Competition is the single strongest signal in the data.
| Competition level | Avg. opportunity score | Niches |
|---|---|---|
| Low | 65.2 | 1,067 |
| Medium | 56.2 | 1,465 |
| Crowded | 34.6 | 782 |
A crowded niche starts roughly 30 points behind a low-competition one before you have written a single word. This is why a validation step that measures competition, not just demand, changes what you decide to build.
The sweet spot: moderate demand, low competition. 845 niches landed there.
The largest low-competition cluster in the data was moderate demand paired with low competition: 845 niches. That combination, not the loudest, most-hyped market, is where the highest realistic scores concentrate.
For reference, 23.4 percent of all scanned niches scored under 40, and only 12 percent scored 70 or above. The winners are a minority, and they are found, not guessed.
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How we built this report
- What the data is: 3,314 completed niche scans submitted by Kupkaike users between March 30 and July 13, 2026, scored by the current scoring engine.
- What it is not: it is not a random sample of the Etsy or Gumroad marketplace. It reflects what independent creators chose to research, which is its value: it is a map of real creator intent, not of listings that already exist.
- What the score measures: each niche gets a 0 to 100 opportunity score built from real demand and competition signals. Demand and competition tiers (strong, moderate, low, and crowded, medium, low) are assigned by the same engine.
- What we left out: an earlier scoring engine (713 scans) used a different scale and is excluded to keep every number comparable. Where we cite listing counts, we report the median (320), never the mean, because a handful of extreme markets distort the average.
- Updated quarterly. Next update: October 2026.
Citing this report? You are welcome to cite this data with a link to this page: kupkaike.com/data/niche-report-2026