Should Steemit advertise?

Yesterday the topic of advertisement came up when discussing steemit at a local crypto meetup in Philadelphia.

To me advertisement is a way to finance a business without requiring a direct cost to the users. However this usually comes at a cost to the user experience. In other words, advertisements are quite annoying.

To that I have to say that I generally hate everything that is free and advertising in particular. I much prefere to pay for things than getting them for free and then have to sell my sould, data, time or attention for it. However most people probably do not mind it as much and would prefere a facebook and google type business model over that of a subscription service.

Steemit pays it's users by inflating the blockchain every year. The inflation rate started at around 9.5% and decreases over 10 years until it reaches just shy of 1%.

According to hypestap.com steemit could generate about $5k a day due to its popularity and pageviews.

That may seem like a lot of money, however consider that this is roughly about $2 M a year and small compared to what steem is rewarding to steemians

Now lets think about the money that steem is giving to its users, via it's inflation?

• Currently Steem is worth about 500M.
• The inflation of steem is currently about 8%

That means the blockchain is giving away about 40M a year or about 100k a day.

So the advertising model would be a small fraction of this, about 5%.

What do you think? Would it be worth putting adds onto steemit.com? And if so what could be done with the money to actually help the steem eco-system?

To me it seems too irrelevant and not worth the price, but I am happy tohear other opinions.