first off, why would portuguese be more practical just because it has more speakers? have you spoken to 8 million people by chance?

Well I can't speak for him, but the amount of speakers plays a huge part in me deciding what languages I will learn. Of course I never plan to speak to 100 million people or even 1 million, but those numbers are still very important. Why? The amount of speakers of a language and the economic status of the country/countries and of the regular people in that/those country/countries plays a very large part in the amount of content available in said language. For example, try as I might, I was unable to find enough interesting original (i.e. not simply translated) content in Norwegian (books, movies, shows, websites, games, etc.) to make learning the language worth it, so I didn't even attempt it. For such a small language (likely due to the economic prosperity of its inhabitants and the rich government through organizations like NRK) Norway puts out a lot of content. It just, for the most part, doesn't interest me. Perhaps if Norway were a country of say 40 million people, there would be more people producing the kind of content that interest me. German, on the other hand, has a plethora of books that interest me, has a lot more movies that interest me, has lots of well-populated interesting websites, etc.

Unless a language is really, really small, the number of speakers it has will very likely not all be encountered by a single person whether through online contact or in person. It's still important however as it directly correlates with the amount of content in a language and thus, the amount of personally interesting content in a language.