Attention got cheap. A point of view didn’t.

India has more than four million creators and a feed that all sounds the same. Abundance made attention cheap. A point of view is the only thing still scarce.

For a decade, the advice never changed. Build a personal brand. Post every day. Show your face. Become a creator.

India listened. According to an ISB study, the country’s creator base grew from under a million in 2020 to more than four million by 2025, with two-thirds of them now coming from outside the big metros, in towns the industry spent years ignoring. The barrier to being seen has collapsed. Anyone with a phone can reach anyone.

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That should have felt like freedom. Mostly, it felt like noise.

When everyone can publish, publishing stops being worth anything. Abundance kills the value of the abundant thing. Attention did not grow to match the supply; it just spread thinner. In India’s creator economy, by some estimates, the top 1% earn over 80% of the money. Millions produce. A handful are heard. “Reach everyone” quietly turned into “reach no one.”

So people looked for a fix. Everyone found the same one. Be authentic. Be vulnerable. Build in public. Share the journey.

And authenticity, performed by everyone at once, became a format.

You know the template. The humble origin story. The post with a line break after every sentence. The “here’s what I learned” thread that learned nothing. Realness, mass-produced. We tried to escape sameness and manufactured more of it.

AI did not create this problem. It industrialised it. When a machine writes a decent caption in two seconds, decent is worthless. The feed fills faster than anyone can read, and almost nothing in it is missed once it’s gone.

Which leaves the question sitting underneath all of it.

If a format can be copied—and it can—and a tone can be borrowed—and it can—what actually can’t be?

A point of view.

You can imitate how a person writes. You cannot imitate what they have decided is true. A specific conviction, an opinion earned the hard way and held in public, disagreement and all, is the one thing that does not scale, does not template, and does not fall out of a prompt.

It is why the creators breaking through here are rarely the most polished. They are the most specific. A farmer explaining soil in Marathi. A doctor willing to say the unpopular thing. A founder with one narrow obsession. Specificity reads as real because it cannot be faked at volume.

Also read: 3 Advertising Lessons from the 1990s That Are Relevant for 2026 and Beyond

So the instruction for brands is not “be more authentic.” That word is spent, worn out by everyone who used it to mean nothing. The real instruction is smaller and harder. Have an opinion. Say the thing a competitor would flinch at. Be willing to lose the people who disagree.

Visibility is free now. Everyone has it. That is exactly why it is worth so little.

The scarce asset was never reach. It was having something to say and the nerve to say it plainly.

Everyone can be heard now.

But almost no one has decided what they want to be heard saying.

– Written by Venkatraman R, a Bangalore-based marketer, brand strategist and entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience across advertising, digital growth and business strategy. Founder of Small, Big and Bold, co-founder of Unigage, and also works as a Fractional CMO, helping brands sharpen their positioning, marketing, GTM and growth. Known for combining strategic thinking with strong creative instinct, Venky brings clarity, commercial sense and a healthy intolerance for bland ideas.