Okay, so bribes, effectively advertising.
But instead of paying new members to consider signing up on STEEM, why not support (pay) the content-creators? Instead, they are taking away a larger cut from the content-creators, to favour the investors (curators). New members won't stay around unless we start properly rewarding good content. When the site is filled with high-quality content, it will grow and prosper. Right now we are chasing away the last of the real content-creators. Almost nothing left here except bots and spam.
Bribing people to send their followers here is only going to work if the followers will want to stay here. Currently, people are flocking away from Steem in droves, so it's not working. We need to fix this ship, not advertise.