Good points you are bringing up there. I recently thought about kind of a 'monthly donation statusbar', which could be displayed at the top of the page (with a close button to remove it for the current session). Maybe it would help when people can see the current status directly on SteemWorld.
Another option would be to add ads on the site, but I'm not really a big fan of that idea. It might be the easiest solution to keep it running though. I'm not sure, how people would react to ads on SteemWorld. It's like doing the opposite of providing a non-tracking Steem site as it is now, but it would bring me a lot more money I guess.
A status bar would be helpful, I think. Something to rally around, anyway. Knowing that it's probably going to be the smaller users, the 0-25,000 SP or so crowd, it's going to take quite a few of us, unless some of the larger accounts get involved. It seems evident, though, that the larger users are less inclined to use steemworld as much as the rest of us seem to. I hope I'm wrong about that.
re: ads
Potentially, it could be very lucrative. I don't click on ads very often, though. But that doesn't mean there wouldn't be others who would do it.