The amount of money currently in the Hive dao is 9.6 Million dollars. We could also fund the purchases through traditional crowdfunding. If we say we have 5k people here that care about things enough to spend some money, spread that across the different income levels and I think we could potentially fund or buy quite a bit.
There's a lot of ways to do ads and ads are the only reason Steemit didn't completely go under. To create a robust ad platform is pretty complex and that's not what Steemit had. I think they were working on that, but they had "cheap" not very targeted ads.
If we instead gave ad space to each community and let community owners manage their own ad space and sell it, then required all sales pay a fee back to the system, we could potentially have something more effective as well as being more decentralized. Just one idea.
Yes, with the dao we can hire developers. I'd suggest the devs here get first dibs, but if someone wanted to project manage the hiring and managing of a project, I think that would be something worth trying.
Very interesting, that is a important budget. Then ads is a good path to improve this place... not a big fan of them :P but I want this project to grow and wouldn't mind to me to have some, if is good for that.