Regardless of the method, the fact still remains that the cost to maintain a primary spot on these sites (whether it be in money or labor) far outweighed the amount of attention we were receiving through them. It's like shouting into an empty room. So again I state, unless you can prove that re-adding these sites will turn out better, then I doubt there will be any rush to re-add them.
Firstly, you don't have to spend money to get on these voting sites - and you can still track a decent amount of attention with enough votes. If we really weren't getting attention by not paying, we wouldn't have vote 1 or 2. Secondly, with a large amount of votes, or just having the server get more votes in general would help. Remember vote 4? When we first initially added it, we didn't pay a dime. And it got us a ton of players nonetheless.
+∞, the server would enjoy any number of new players. If following the patterns we saw with Vote 4, we could reach 200 people online at peak. I would just be sad that my recently bought eff7 would drop a good 100k+ in value ;-; Still, small price to pay.