I think the value of the platform, first and foremost is determined by its content, and as such a huge problem standing in the way of growth for steemit lies in the fact that there is negative incitement for established top content providers to switch to the platform.

The reality is: established content providers make money from advertising and their established followers that they will lose the moment they move to steemit. Basically they start from scratch on the platform, hoping they can build a new following to make up for the old one no longer generating profits. The old following is used to adds, the potential new following, as you so rightfully point out is unlikely to even tolerate them. But I think this doesn't need to be a problem. What I think would be the solution to make these two wolds connect is actually pretty straight forward.

• Posts don't get advertising unless the author opts in his/her post.
• Advertising won't show on posts if the visitor has been authenticated as a steemit user.
• Advertising won't show up on posts if the visitor arrives on the post from another steemit page.
• Advertising is modeled as an automated internal market (like the STEEM/SBD internal market, but also like a two-sided version of Amazon advertising bids system) based on tags.

By doing it this way, none of the regular steemit users should even notice there are adds. Someone however who is an established content provider on an other platform however will draw visitors who aren't steemit users (yet), visitors that, coming in from FB/Twitter/etc links will get presented with advertising that would provide the content provider with hopefully a competitive revenue stream.

Note, I'm not in any way suggesting any of the revenues from advertising should go to Steemit Inc. I am suggesting the feature of allowing established top content providers to migrate without loss of advertising revenues will end up improving the monetary value of STEEM, what in turn will fix things for Steemit Inc.

Without Steemit INC or any other third party getting in between the person running the add campaign and the established top content providers, in theory steemit should have a competitive edge from the perspective of both the content provider and the person buying click throughs.

Hope I'm makeing sense here.