Hmmm, that is interesting that people were talking about it. I had never hear of it until today.
Yeah it looks way harder to make a buck over there for sure with the ad revenue model. Steemit's silver bullet is that it is crypto currency backed. Minds should implement a crypto and then it could have an economy like what is going on over here. Easier said than done though and the founders might be worried about the legalities of it if they have centralized servers. They might be worried it would be like issuing shares but I think the best thing to do would be to make the crypto decentralized. They could literally use the STEEM code and base everything off that since it is already a working model.
You could put a banner ad in your post for a previous post just like I put the footer banner at the bottom of all my posts on here.