I've voted because you seem like a decent guy with decent intentions and I enjoyed your talk at Hivefest AND we need SOMETHING....but I'm so far, I am doubtful of the methods you mention. "Hiring Shills" doesn't sound like a great way to attract people who bring something to the community. It sounds like a way to get a bad reputation. I know more word of mouth is what we need but we don't want to invite a whole shit storm of spam and scams back here and be known for hiring shills, we had enough of that with steem. That'll all come eventually but I think we need a bigger core first.

Also giving away Hive will not necessarily get people interested in Hive, I think more likely, people will just see "FREE CRYPTO" and when they win they'll just trade it for bitcoin right away.

The best use of your money will be to reward hive users to do better work at getting the word out without being spammy...

I've been trying to get Hive members to leave sincere comments with substance on youtube that mention Hive as a side-note and then we like each others comments. The only problem with this is that youtube will block links. It seems we can get around that by typing "hive . blog" or "3speak . co" with a space in between. Youtube comments is how I (and many others) found steem. I think it's way more effective than twitter.

Another idea is to promote individual users off hive who will actively promote hive (once again, without being spammy). There are many ways you can do this. You can promote some artists hive pages off hive after they win some contest or are nominated by many people. You could also find someone to do a better voiceover for that hive ad that went trending a few days ago and then use the money to promote that ad.

The fact is, very few people will trust "Free internet money" and those who do already knew about steem and lost trust in it, so we need to market the community, and we don't do that by constantly saying "HIVE HIVE HIVE HIVE" we do that by doing fun stuff that people notice and then saying "oh yeah, theres lots more of this at hive"

Another idea...you could make a proposal just for promotion of your game (maybe a smaller amount for now cause hive is so low) and then promote it any way you want. I'd vote for it. Is that frowned upon? It shouldn't be. I think the DAO should be giving money to any decent project that doesn't have the funds for self promotion, as long as they prove they are using the funds well.