We've all been accustomed to the idea of a free to consume social media and also F2P games. Of course, lots of these ventures are heavily backed by VC money so it's a grow at all costs policy before they even need to think of ways to monetise.

I guess at the end of the day, any product on HIVE has to first be appealing enough to draw a large userbase. That means attracting users from outside of HIVE instead of depending on just leeching whatever free audience available here.

I'd say Splinterlands was and is still the breakout star of HIVE. At it's peak, new users were flooding into the ecosystem without even knowing the existence of the HIVE blockchain it was built on.