Not true. The spike occurred right after they started paying out, but the site had been running with users on it prior to that.

I know the site has been running prior to that, I said people didn't know if it was working as intended ( if it was paying)

Much of the falling price of STEEM since the spike has been to pay for these things to occur.

The price of steem didn't fall because rewards were cashed out, rewards are a drop in a bucket compared to what whales have been cashing out and what the hyperinflation is doing.

begin selling advertisements of some sort.

A few hundreds per day is not gonna make any difference and I doubt any investors will pay more than that with 2000 daily users. Having many ways to burn coins is certainely a good idea to reduce inflation but if you rely on this to pay for the ever increasing user base then you are in for a surprise.

If you believe that it has gotten to this point, then why are you still wasting your time here?

You missed the point. I was just explaining to you why a share in a company can't increase if the overall value of the company decreases which is exactly what happened to steem.