I was thinking...
the value of social media sites always correlates to how useful they are to advertisers.
Facebook has an absurd value on their company almost entirely because they collect data and use it to serve people ads they are likely to be interested in. Also, if you look at Google you can see the company gives away half of its software for free in the form of the old Google labs, Google Earth, Gmail, Youtube, etc. and all of the billions of dollars are from ads, they have seemingly infinite money to hire as many people as they want to do whatever they want all because of ads.
Now obviously ads are super annoying and adblock exists for a reason, but to some extent ads are good and we have promoted area for a reason too, right? The problem is the promote feature here is mostly useless so nobody is going to be investing any serious amount for that purpose. I seriously doubt anyone would be investing a large amount of money to use promoted feature.
I suggest we start considering more options for advertising that can only be purchased with steem tokens, in a convenient and useful way. A banner ad showing in gaming category for example, could be set to only display on posts made by people of 50+ rep, or only display to people that have also made a gaming post. Things like this would go beyond just promoting your own post in hopes of getting upvotes, and give real value to steem in the form of external sales.
I have steem tokens so why can't I use them to spam you with stuff? lol
Maybe then I would want to buy more of them when I run out?