A million people out of a population of 1.5 billion is 0.07% of the web population. In most places that is a very select group and not the common denominator. Something that is some times missed is just how big a group you can reach with the web. Finding all of them can be a challenge but such groups tend to self organize around seeds.

There is economic value in an article which acts as a seed to attract an audience. This value may not be fully reflected as a multiple of inbound page views, and may need to incorporate interactions among the self-organized audience and content that is "related" to the original article.