The relativity of significance

My side project today is reading through a text written by an associate professor at my old university and making sure the English is in good shape. The text in question is about the European Under-17 Championship (my fingers spell "champtionship" every time I try to spell that...), and he mentions the fact that with a crowd of only 70,000 spectators and only Eurovision carrying the games live, the event isn't as significant as something like the World Cup.

This is certainly true, but it got me thinking about the meaning of "significance." We tend to tie the significance of an event together with the number of people observing, experiencing, or affected by it, and 70,000 just isn't that many people. But if you went back a few hundred years to a world with a much smaller population, I imagine that an event attended by 70,000 people would be considered of immense significance – consider that the Roman Colosseum had a seating capacity of 50,000. The actual number of people directly impacted by the event is identical, but the narrative is seen as less significant because that number is a smaller proportion of the greater mass of people to which the attendees belong.

It also occurs to me some events that are attended or experienced by relatively few people (Woodstock and the TED Conferences are two examples) nonetheless have a huge indirect impact on culture and thought.