The NCSA and Cern web servers had the ability to let users on a system publish content from a specially named "~/public_html" directory. At UIUC, the engineering labs quietly enabled this functionality for all engineering students.

Within a week, dozens of students had their own web pages up, and by the end of the year, hundreds did. Encouraged by their initial success, this encouraged students to stand up their own web servers so they could run cgi scripts, etc.

As far as I knew, there was no equivalent taste-test for providers of Gopher content. You either stood up your own server or got special access to someone else's server, both of which were hard to do at the time.