There are only two ways to public success:
1) Get a group of really rich people to buy into your talent.
2) Get a really large number of people with little to no money (a.k.a. web forum posters/trolls) to buy into your talent. The rich people like to make their money off of these people with no money so they'll use that.
Whether you end up with any profit at all is a whole other issue though.