Hi @themarkymark. well, it is not a $20 question but a $1 million plan.
I think we must exploit at maximum the attention economy as a real product, that has an important intrinsic value and where we are taking advantages as a pioneer platform that have half accomplished its aim to reward the time spended by users.

Our fail reside in the fact that we are excluding any kind of possible investment in this platform, because we think that an investor should be another blogger that produce "quality contet". and that is just simply ridiculous. An investor only have to care about ROI. And our aim should be provide all tools needed to take decission of how much they must invest to have an specific ROI.
Attention has not  meaning if you can not associate it with an audience and have not any kind of real metrics to prove that you own that few minutes that represents a scarce value coin.
We need the investmet tools that clearly show how much time we grab from that one million users. But it is just the begining, because we must trade for money (investement) that attention time of our users. The problem is that it means that we must develop applications for advertisments, and many others applications wich aims is to catch that little attention to others things different from the original content; that is the price to pay. We must give away some precious minutes of attention of our users in order to have money that keep growing our base of users, and this is inevitable if we want to suceed.
In resume, we must show to the investor that in a blockchain like Steem it is possible to have serious metrics about how much time an user really spend in certains topics, and the most important how much of that attention time could be redirected to his bussiness. This is pure gold in our blockchain.