There’s a painful irony at the heart of content creation: the posts that cost you the most—in research, thinking, and emotional labor—often attract the smallest audiences. Meanwhile, that listicle you threw together in an hour goes viral.This isn’t random. It’s structural.
We avoid what makes us uncomfortable
Valuable content frequently tackles subjects that provoke discomfort. A tax attorney writing about estate planning strategies for blended families addresses divorce, death, and family conflict. A cybersecurity expert explaining zero-trust architecture forces readers to confront their organization’s vulnerabilities. A nutritionist discussing intuitive eating asks people to question their entire relationship with food.These topics matter enormously. They’re also exactly what people procrastinate on, bookmark for later, or scroll past entirely.
Compare this to “5 Productivity Hacks That Changed My Life” or “Why Everyone’s Talking About This New Framework.” These pieces ask nothing difficult of readers. They promise easy wins, validation, and the comfort of following trends everyone else already understands.
Difficulty creates friction
Truly valuable content often requires prerequisites. You can’t write meaningfully about advanced topics without assuming some foundational knowledge, which immediately shrinks your potential audience. The alternative—explaining everything from first principles—produces such lengthy, demanding content that most people bounce before they reach the valuable insights.
A database engineer writing about query optimization for distributed systems has vital information for people managing large-scale applications. But that audience is infinitesimal compared to “Getting Started With SQL.” The advanced piece might help readers save millions in infrastructure costs. The beginner piece gets ten thousand views.
Search engines reward different things
SEO algorithms optimize for engagement metrics: click-through rates, time on page, bounce rates. But people engage differently with challenging versus comfortable content. They might spend three minutes on a beach read-style article and thirty seconds on something that requires genuine thought—not because the latter is worse, but because they’re saving it to PDF, or need to read it three times, or have to step away to process.The metrics don’t capture value. They capture ease.
Stakeholders misread the signals
When traffic becomes the primary success metric, organizations systematically deprioritize their most important work. The legal blog stops publishing nuanced analysis of case law and pivots to “What To Do After a Car Accident” content-mill pieces. The engineering team abandons architectural deep-dives for tutorial spam. The consultant stops writing about what clients actually need and starts chasing LinkedIn engagement with generic motivation quotes.Everyone responds rationally to incentives. The incentives just happen to be backwards.
The paradox compounds over time
Here’s where it gets worse: because difficult, valuable content underperforms, creators produce less of it. This creates a scarcity loop. The people who most need sophisticated insights on complex topics can’t find them, because everyone’s learned that writing them doesn’t pay. The internet becomes progressively shallower, not because we lack expertise, but because expertise doesn’t travel.
This isn’t inevitable
Some audiences specifically seek out difficult content. Academic communities, professional forums, and specialized newsletters succeed precisely because they’ve opted out of the traffic game. They’ve built distribution around depth rather than breadth.The solution isn’t to dumb down your work. It’s to stop measuring its success by the metrics that reward shallow content. Find the hundred people who desperately need your most challenging piece instead of chasing the hundred thousand who’ll skim something easy and forget it.
Your best work might never trend. That doesn’t mean it isn’t working.