I made an earlier post about Ethereum some week or two ago, you are encouraged to read it.  Ethereum is a copyrighting coin but a larger version of Mastercoin.  They spend a lot of time spamming YouTube and articles which are only read by a few hundred.  Surprisingly they've recently had a video with 6000 views but that was over two months, a day old video of a kitten playing with yarn can get more views.

It's a ponzi scheme ran by wealthy investors and there is even a Goldman Sachs' connection.  Nobody wants to contribute to a get quick rich scheme benefiting a few people hence most stay away from that.  After all how is Vitalik flying around the world, staying in hotels and partying it up at conventions?  There's money coming from somewhere.

  With a $30 million IPO, I am not going to invest $1K or $10K as I would only get 0.00003% to 0.0003% of all Ether.  That translates to risking a huge amount of capital (for an average Joe at least) on a coin that may not go past $40 million.   The people who invested into Mastercoin / Maidsafe would had made more money buying Doge, NxT, Darkcoin, et cetera.

Honestly big IPOs or wealthy investors doesn't mean jack.  Crypto currencies don't have an issue in funding but an issue in educating consumers to use their coin over say Bitcoin or a money transfer like Paypal.  No amount of wealthy investors can change that, to be honest.  In Bitcoin and Doge's case - that was all offline viral P2P advertising (like telling your friends to use Bitcoin) or forum advertising.  I learned about crypto currencies from reading an internet forum and I don't think that person was being paid to promote BTC.