Youre right, but there's another way to do it. just blueskying here bear with me.

You come in with an affiliate account, and you make a post offering deals where steemit users get some portion of your affiliate commission back, plus some portion of the commissions from the post back.

So take like amazon. Affiliate commissions on amazon vary depending on the type of product, but average is somewhere int he 4-5% range... though some things like amazon type electronics (kindle, alexa, etc) its as much as 10.

So you have a steem exclusive rebates post, where you link featured products and anyone who clicks through, buys one, and gives you their refund information gets 50% of your affiliate commission as a refund, paid in steem, and you divvy up all the post rewards and distribute them according to steem-power of the buyer.

SO something like the big kindle that runs $200, you could offer ten bucks cash back just off the bat, in steem.

Plus, you can offer some amount of refund based on post rewards. And it could be significant if the posts started getting high powered support.

Even better if you pledged to power up all the affiliate commissions you keep. This way, 100% of affiliate commissions would go to buy steem, and have a postiive impact on price.

this would actually work really really well, even without any whale support, IMO.