Well, like any good demagogue, he's found a niche and he knows how to exploit it. I watched Peterson on Canadian TV years before he became world famous, and he was always pushing discussions in interesting directions, often by bringing up what sounded like evolutionary psychological criticisms of liberal presumptions. He was always challenging the liberal status quo, so he was the radical on the discussion panels (on TVO's "The Agenda," where he was a frequent guest).

His Jungian background and radical evolutionary psychology attract an unreflective audience that's never heard anything like that before. And he presents it all in a manly, conservative package, which attracts especially the alt-right crowd. So that's his cultural niche. He's like Julius Evola in that respect, a mystagogic apologist for conservative/natural brutalities.

That's what made him initially famous, I think, his ability to exploit an audience with that message that happens to be right for this populist zeitgeist (because of problems with neoliberalism and with woke feminism from a chauvinistic male perspective). But once he became famous, I expect his audience would have grown all the more just because fame builds on itself.