And since the current vote-bot business models are already very efficient at extracting a big chunk of value from the rewards pool I'm skeptical you can outgrow them, even if you figure out a more virtuous model.

No doubt that it's a heavy lift, and it won't be me. I have no plans to run any paid voting services. But I have a hard time believing that someone with the right funding and motivations couldn't come up with a solution that wouldn't depend on clients to continuously cannibalize their own holdings. I'm just trying to imagine what a better solution might look like.

Certainly, there is no perfect answer, but I think that improvement is always possible.

Relative to other internet sites I don't think there are a lot of people here, so there's not enough eyeballs to sell.

Yeah, I agree with this. I'm imagining that content creators would be motivated to grow their audience by ambitiously promoting their own blogs outside the Steem ecosystem, just like they do for other platforms.

There's another wildcard in the mix, too. In about 1-2 years, we start to expect an increasingly sharper decline in creation of new STEEM per day. I'm not sure at all what that will mean for usage & ROI for the voting services (or organic usage, for that matter). It's going to be different from anything that we've seen in the past.