Maybe you can start by by persuading whales to stop voting burn posts and actually vote the newbies instead, giving newbies some tasks and tracking their retention via a tag or follow account?
Back before the fork created Hive, there was an experiment called 'The Stewards of Gondor' in which modest delegations (~5k Hive IIRC) were provided trusted delegates to use to curate high quality content they felt was under-rewarded. Because no actual transfers of stake were required, the total cost of the experiment was only fraud from the very few untrustworthy delegates that used the delegations to upvote themselves, which was quickly and easily corrected by withdrawing the delegations.
Because Hive will get listings if enough people use it, and will continue to struggle to get listings until enough people use it, the Stewards of Gondor program of making good authors happy they posted on Hive, which is the best marketing program that could be created for Hive to attract new users, is all that is necessary to attract and retain users. Best of all it costs nothing but upvoting good creators - which is what Hive is supposed to be all about.
User retention is abysmal on Hive, because instead of encouraging new users HW was funded to eradicate them from the platform and the Stewards of Gondor program ended with the massive DV war that removed the funder from the platform. I submit that this is not accidental, and is undertaken to maintain the complete control of Hive governance by ~36 whales that continue to extract >90% of rewards from the rewards pool by virtue of their complete control of governance as a result of possessing >50% of stake voting for witnesses continually since 2016.
Hive does not need to spend >$1M/annum to market it. What it really needs is good creators happy they published on Hive, and that's all it needs to grow and raise it's token price. Anything that doesn't produce good creators happy they published on Hive will fail to retain Hive users in the long term, as we see continues to happen today, and fail to attract new users to the platform. That's all we need, and nothing else will do.
Particularly as Valueplan continues to refuse to use GAAP to prevent theft by fraud of the enormous sums it disburses, it increasingly appears to be a vehicle to facilitate fraud, and not a mechanism to market Hive. I will continue to vote only the Return Proposal and advocate everyone else does too, until and unless Valueplan adopts GAAP (simple double entry bookkeeping) to be accountable to the Hive community for it's huge expenditures of the DHF.
I also strongly recommend repeating the Stewards of Gondor experiment to show that good authors happy they posted on Hive because they receive rewards in the form of upvotes for their content will remain Hive users, and will attract new users.
I appreciate your strong public stance holding Valueplan to account. Please carefully consider supporting my recommendations so that Hive can proceed to succeed - without frittering away our development fund unnecessarily.