It's actually pretty cheap for an advertiser to just buy some Steem and do a post here that they buy votes for. That would get it on trending and they would be pumping money into this platform. It's probably cheaper than a lot of other places and they may actually make something overall.
I won't be surprised if people are working on ways to get ads onto Steemit. If you have enough followers then you have an audience they want and it could be fairly targeted. I see Steemkr has ads, but I assume they use conventional means and pay for running the site.
All of the revenue for that is going to the bid-bot owners though and the stakeholders who are funding the bots. Is this really incentivizing the type of activity we want people to be offering?
I know and I am not a supporter of vote selling, but maybe ads are a better use of trending than the junk posts you tend to find there. I think we need more whales investing delegation and general voting in supporting good content makers even if they don't pay. That will make the platform more attractive. We need to build the userbase to millions and many will be put off if they just see low quality.
I'm investing my time and using my few dollars of votes each day to support people as well as helping deal with some of the abuse. I still have confidence that Steem can succeed.
I think @zappl is doing it based on this post:
https://steemit.com/zappl/@zappl/big-updates-coming-soon
I've not seen much from them lately. I expect their service to be more popular.