I am tempted to ask if you saw my talk at Steemfest 3 last year where I touched on this :p .

Indeed driving engagement using Steem as an asset/resource that then benefits you outside of just the author/curator/benefactor rewards is imo the way to create sustainable demand for STEEM that is based on actual value creation.

I think since giving this talk about a year ago, the only parts I now see differently is that other Steem stakeholders, who may not be interested in your business, might not agree to significant amounts of new STEEM going to reward comments that benefits one private website, and thus one is exposed to the risk of downvotes, etc. So I'm more curious to see if there would be ways to make it attractive even if we assumed that the current reward pool was completely removed. And where the remaining value proposition is mostly centred on allowing more person-to-person tips/sponsoring/promotion/buying access to unique perks and features, etc. Thus making use of how fast/feeless/immutable Steem is rather than rewards.