If you have enough at the top of your interest funnel, you don’t need to be very effective at conversion to seem successful at the other end of the funnel.
And so, a billion people visit Wikipedia and 32 million become registered users and 3,800 earn the privilege of being trusted enough to create a new article without oversight.
TED has a billion views which leads to 4,000 TEDx events that reach hundreds of thousands of in-person participants and 2,500 end up coming to Vancouver.
Kickstarter has millions of visitors, tens of thousands of projects and a few of those do more than a million dollars in revenue.
The internet has enabled the wide funnel, but it’s incredibly uncommon. That’s not because the last part of the process is difficult, it’s because the first part–becoming a huge hit–is. Best not to waste attention if you can avoid it.