After 36 hours it's had over 10,000 views between Imgur, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitter and Embedly.
That's not counting Tumblr and Twitter, but it did go across 7,600+ people dashes, that I know. I don't use Twitter much and generally don't like it, but posted there anyway. I did not expect to get a lot of upvotes on Reddit and I was correct, but not getting any downvotes on Imgur was an unexpected surprise! This many people seeing the word "Steem" was well worth every advertising dollar, which was $0. =)
I did not link to Steemit.com from Reddit or Imgur, figuring people wondering what the hell "Steem" was may be better than appearing to be an advertisement for Steemit. I saw the results someone else had on Reddit by posting a link to Steemit (a mod reprimanded them), so I waited until someone asked about it in comments and then posted a link. So far so good! On Imgur I just gave a one sentence explanation of what Steem was with no link.
If 10% of the 15 year olds who viewed this image searched for the word "Steem" afterwards and checked the site out ... success! ;) In 10 years they will be the major players here on Steemit. I'm well aware that Dan doesn't approve of this type of advertising for Steem (based off his downvote); and frankly I don't care, because the bottom line is ... it works!
I'm invested in Steem and I will use any method to promote it that I know works, especially if it cost me nothing more than 10 minutes of my free time. Getting nearly 10,000 people to view a GIF and wonder what the hell "Steem" is, and possibly come to check it out, far outweighs Dan's downvote here on Steemit in the long run. ;)