For teams producing on behalf of clients
For agencies, PLR publishers and content teams
You are producing on a deadline for someone else. A client wants a lead magnet, a publisher wants twenty new titles this quarter, a channel needs a downloadable that pulls its weight. The topic gets chosen in a meeting, or from whatever the client mentioned last, or from a keyword tool that reports search volume for a term nobody sells. Then it ships, and nobody can say whether the category was ever worth entering.
That is the gap this is built for: not choosing the topic for you, but knowing what the shelf looked like before you committed the production hours.
What a monthly brief contains
Five to eight niches, each carrying the same measured record.
- Effective listing count, which is raw listings filtered down to the ones actually relevant to the query
- Competition reading, crowding plus how concentrated the shelf is across shops
- Median price and the share of listings under five dollars
- A verdict of sweet, saturated, dead or inconclusive, with the 0 to 100 score inside it
- A confidence band reporting whether the measurement request was answered in full
- The timestamp of the measurement
Plus what moved since the previous brief, once there is more than one.
Every number comes from the Etsy Open API and the arithmetic is published in full on the methodology page. Nothing is estimated, and nothing that could not be measured is filled in with a guess. A niche that cannot be measured is reported as inconclusive rather than scored.
The August 2026 brief is public. It is the format, with real data, not a mockup.
Why not just run a keyword tool
You can, and for keyword work you should. The difference is what gets counted.
A keyword tool reports what people typed. This reports what sellers are actually listing, at what price, and how many distinct shops hold the shelf. Those answer different questions, and the second one is the one that decides whether a category is enterable.
The concentration figure has no equivalent in most keyword tools. Two hundred listings across 190 shops and two hundred across twelve shops produce nearly identical search-volume numbers and describe opposite situations.
Second difference: the score is deterministic. Same measurement, same number, every time, with the formula published. When a client asks why a category was ranked below another, the answer is arithmetic you can show them rather than a vendor index nobody outside the vendor can inspect.
Third: refusal. When the measurement is thin or absent, the output says so instead of producing a confident-looking number. For work you are putting your name on in front of a client, a tool that admits what it does not know is worth more than one that never does.
Three different uses
Agencies
A client asks for a content or product plan for the next quarter. The brief becomes the evidence layer under the recommendation: here is what is on the shelf, here is how concentrated it is, here is what buyers currently pay. It moves the conversation from taste to measurement, and it survives the client asking where the numbers came from.
PLR publishers
Your economics are volume and shelf life. A title in a saturated category still sells, but slowly and at a discount, and you find out months after the production cost is sunk. Screening a candidate list against measured competition before commissioning is cheaper than finding out from sales data. The concentration figure is the most useful column here: a shelf held by a few large shops behaves very differently from a fragmented one at the same listing count.
Content teams and creators
You are choosing what to make a video, a newsletter issue or a downloadable about. The relevance-filtered listing count tells you whether the audience already buys in that category or only talks about it. Those two look identical in search volume and are not the same audience.
What this is not
It is not a sales estimate. Active listings are evidence that sellers believe buyers exist and keep paying to stay on the shelf. They are not transactions, and the methodology page is explicit about the difference.
It is not multi-platform. It is Etsy. If your clients sell into a newsletter or on Amazon, this measures an adjacent market.
It is not a forecast. There is no trend line and no seasonality correction.
Getting a sample brief
This is in validation, and we would rather talk to a handful of teams properly than launch a format nobody asked for. There is no signup for it yet.
Write to michael@kupkaike.com with what you produce and for whom, and we will send back a brief on niches relevant to your actual work, at no cost.
If the format is wrong for you, that is useful too and we would like to hear it.
Start with the methodology if you want to check the arithmetic before spending a message on us.