I'm not a big fan of automating link building with a money site. I think it just isn't worth the risk and the links you get using automation won't be that good anyway unless you have some really sophisticated setup.
I have automated social in the past, and still do to some extent, but that is only because I don't like to spend time on the social sites myself (too much time suck). When I automated in the past I used a number of different social automation tools. On the one site I had the most success with, I was semi-automating social using Onlywire. But those were real accounts that just syndicated the same message out to a number of different social platforms. I know that I had some followers coming to my site from those social sites. And it made me feel like it was simulating human interest in the eyes of the search engines. Actually I think I was using Hootsuite combined with Onlywire. Hootsuite read my feed and Tweeted when a new article was published. Onlywire saw the Tweet and then sent the blurbs to the rest of the social sites (like about 15 of them I think). I really don't do any of that anymore. Don't need to.
After trying to use every SEO spam tool and every type of site to build links for SEO over the years, I eventually came to a conclusion. The best use of my time is taking the time to build and/or acquire one link that will actually count and pass PageRank and actually help boost the rankings of the page/site it links to. Therefore, I don't link build in quantity at all anymore. Again, don't need to. If you are getting links that count, you really don't need that many of them. This is especially true if you are doing all the other SEO things right (excellent on-page and site-wide SEO). The type of links I like the best are links that look 100% natural (like some webmaster created the link because it is useful for the person visiting that page). They are contextually embedded links from authoritative pages.
With that in mind, if I was building a site like you outlined here, if one of the articles I was publishing was an article that I thought was worth ranking highly, I would start out by going and getting one link (that counts) pointing at that page. If I felt it needed it (and most pages do need it), I would also build some internal links from other pages within the site that point to that new page using relevant anchor text (keywords I hope to rank for).
Based on the type of site you are talking about, it sounds like the site is going to have hundreds of pages where one new page is published every day. I would not build links to every single new page that is published. If I had access to somewhere where I could very easily and inexpensively acquire limitless amounts of great links that won't get penalized, then I probably would build a lot more links. But that source doesn't exist to my knowledge.
Because acquiring good links is time consuming and sometimes costly, I would try to get high rankings with the least amount of links possible. Therefore, I would build a couple really juicy links to the homepage probably. I would also just build a link or two each to the internal pages that I felt I wanted to rank the highest for their relevant keywords. Of course I would also do the internal links to sculpt the PageRank where I want it to go.
As far as that business model you outlined is concerned:
As my methods continue to evolve for building websites, I find myself moving to building sites that have fewer pages on them. But those pages have higher quality content. If I am going to take the time to produce a page by myself using my time to do it, then I am only going to try to produce something above average. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes not. But I don't go for volume anything anymore. I just don't think it is worth it. At least not based on my experience. So I no longer build money sites that have to drip content for some reason. I just publish the content pretty much all at once. If at some point I have new content to add, then I add it when that content is produced.
