I agree without a way to comment without a Steem account it wouldn't really be viable unless the majority of your audience was already a Steem user. Each new account needs 3 STEEM or 15 SP Delegation to be created, it makes sense that they do phone verification to reduce the ability to create multiple accounts. Still it takes 3-7 days to get through verification which seems weird. I wonder if the 18k accounts yesterday signals they have reduced the wait time.