I'm cautiously optimistic about the prospects for steemit, but it's notoriously hard to predict how any internet service will do. I think it's a harder sell than some others. You can say it's 'a blogging site that pays', but explaining how steem works would take a lot longer. Most people are barely aware of cryptocurrency apart from seeing Bitcoin in the news (mainly due to things like Silk Road and thefts from exchanges). For now it will mainly appeal to geeks, but I would that can widen to include general bloggers who are on Wordpress and other services. Reddit is probably the closest competitor and that is fairly geeky, so there's definitely potential.
As we discussed about Tsu, I've seen something like this before and I hope that lessons are learned.