Right now, the main reason to buy STEEM is to get voting power. Is it a sufficient incentive?
Looking at the platform now, with about 40,000 users and maybe 15k active, voting power may not be enough incentive to convince people to power up their steem dollars.
If the platform continues growing though, the incentive to get voting power will become clear. Remember, there are no ads here. If enough people migrate from their social networks to here then the only way for businesses to reach them is to allocate some of their marketing budget to steemit and support the people using it directly.
You raise a good point here, but before reaching this milestone (businesses pourring fresh money & buying voting power to advert their content) the platform has to gain a huge traction while maintaining the price of Steem without the help of real money and that is quite challenging.
I'm expecting the price of Steem to drop to somewhere around 0.001btc. Then we will have more clue on how people react when there will still be some reward but much less than what we have seen until now.