I agree that just having the best tech isn't always enough, but it's an important first step when trying to attract developers. Unlike investors, it's hard to lure developers with promises of future functionality, they usually want something they can use now.
We'll definitely have to market our platform too, and there's many ways we can do that: publish white papers, press releases, post about the benefits on developer sites, and directly approach promising projects. Anyone on Hive can contribute to our marketing efforts in some of these different ways.
But perhaps the simplest thing is to enable our existing dev base. We actually have many developers on Hive now, so I'm focusing my own team's efforts towards easing the development process for those devs.
Regarding the "ads on hive.blog" idea, it's a theoretically attractive idea, but I don't think it makes sense to pursue it now. We already have a good idea how much revenue it will likely generate, as Steemit already tried it, and when I weighed that revenue stream versus the opportunity costs of developing and maintaining an ad platform on hive.blog, I decided that the opportunity cost was too high right now. But if there's another team that wants to take up the task and is willing to do any wheeling-and-dealing to find and keep advertisers, I wouldn't be opposed to hosting the ads on a trial basis.