I always felt steemit.com would be a lot easier to market when communities, SMT's and RC pools are here and hopefully also easy signups at some point. It will make it a much better product.
I think a lot more people will start onboarding campaigns when they have set up their own community with an SMT and RC pool for steemit.com.
I have personally onboarded a fair bit of users but only a handful stayed when the price of STEEM dropped. And I get it. It's not easy to stay invested in this place without the money that lured one here in the good times, it takes some real belief to understand Steem in its current form and stay invested with your time and money.
I think in the future we will see a lot more applications and communities simply 'powered by Steem' but they will be completely separate from each other.
Like an APPICS user might never play SPLINTERLANDS but they are both 'powered by Steem'.
These applications will market their own applications to the world. And through those efforts, Steem can achieve greater adoption.