The creators everyone criticizes may understand attention better than the creators everyone respects.
If you’ve spent any time on social media, you’ve probably noticed a frustrating pattern.
Some creators spend years developing expertise, producing educational content, sharing valuable insights, and genuinely helping their audiences. Yet many of them struggle to reach large audiences or generate significant income.
At the same time, other creators seem to become wildly successful by posting content that many people would describe as ridiculous, cringe-worthy, or outright meaningless. Their videos attract millions of views. Their followers grow rapidly. They buy expensive cars, travel the world, and publicly showcase their success.
The natural question is: why?
The obvious answer is that people simply enjoy low-quality content. But I don’t think that’s the full story. In fact, when you ask people what they watch, most will tell you the opposite.
“I hate that content.”
“I can’t stand those creators.”
“That stuff is terrible.”
Interestingly, the key word here is hate.
I’ve already unpacked parts of this attention problem in my blog, but here I want to stay with the mechanism itself: why the content people claim to hate so often travels farther than the content they respect.
The Economics of Attention
As marketers, we often think about a simple question: if your goal were to build a channel that consistently generates hundreds of thousands — or even millions — of views, what type of content would you create?
Educational content?
Probably not. Most people aren’t actively looking to learn something every time they open TikTok or Instagram.
Comedy?
It helps, but creating genuinely funny content at scale is extremely difficult. Unless you’re one of the country’s best comedians, it’s hard to make every piece entertaining enough to go viral.
So what kind of content consistently spreads?
Content that provokes a strong emotional reaction.
And one of the strongest emotional reactions is outrage.
Why Outrage Travels Faster Than Value
When people encounter content that shocks, confuses, or annoys them, they rarely move on quietly. Instead, they watch it again. They read the comments. They share it with friends. They send it into group chats with messages like:
“Have you seen this?”
“Look at this nonsense.”
“I can’t believe someone actually posted this.”
At that point, people no longer spread the content because they enjoy it. They spread it because they can’t stop talking about it.
This is where virality begins.
Social media algorithms don’t measure whether people love a piece of content. They measure engagement. If people watch, comment, share, argue, react, and come back, the algorithm reads that as a signal that the content is interesting — and shows it to more people.
The algorithm doesn’t distinguish between admiration and frustration. Both look like attention.
Why Expert Creators Often Struggle With Virality
There’s another side to this phenomenon.
Creators with strong values, professional expertise, and intellectual discipline often have a hard time producing highly provocative content. They prefer nuance over sensationalism. Accuracy over controversy. Substance over shock value.
As a result, their content may educate people, but it doesn’t always trigger the intense emotional response that drives sharing.
Someone watches a thoughtful explanation of business strategy and thinks: “That was useful.” Then they keep scrolling.
The content delivered value, but it didn’t create an irresistible urge to share it.
That’s why many highly knowledgeable creators grow slowly, while creators producing far less valuable content can explode in popularity almost overnight.
Popularity and Respect Are Not the Same Thing
One of the biggest misconceptions online is that visibility equals admiration.
It doesn’t.
Some of the most viewed creators on the internet are also among the most criticized. Their audiences may not respect them. They may not even like them. But they continue watching.
And in the attention economy, continued attention is often more valuable than approval.
This creates a strange paradox: the very people who complain about a creator may be contributing to that creator’s success. Every angry comment, every hate-watch, every shared clip increases reach.
The system rewards engagement, not judgment.
The Real Lesson: Attention Follows Emotion
The lesson isn’t that creators should start making outrageous content.
The lesson is that attention follows emotion.
Many educational creators assume that being correct is enough. Unfortunately, it usually isn’t.
People share content because it makes them feel something powerful — not simply because it teaches them something useful.
The creators who understand this dynamic often outperform creators with far greater expertise.
Whether that’s good or bad is open to debate. But from a marketing perspective, it helps explain one of the internet’s most persistent mysteries:
The content people claim to hate is often the content they help spread the most.