Potential Institutional Investors
Some institutional investors are entering the cryptocurrency world, but it is too new and scary for most and they are uneasy. The main source of this unease is the lack of proven use cases. i.e working projects that have large user bases.
Think about bitcoin, while you likely know some people that own some, you probably don't know many that use it. Bitcoin's only proven use case is making money, that self fulfilling investment strategy makes institutional investors nervous.
Active Daily Users
Whereas one thing that institutional investors do understand are social networks and user engagement metrics, given all their investments in Facebook, twitter, snapchat, etc, they have teams of analysis that just work on social media. And looking at Steemit's user numbers (graph below) it is something that the big fund managers can use to justify an investment. It has the extra bonus that it will allow them to show their subset of clients, that are interested in crypto, that they are engaged in that space, while still having the hard data to backup the investment to more skeptical clients.
Image take from this post by
A Naive Steemit App
Steemit's 2017 roadmap plans for the launch of naive apps for Android and iOS and given the already established high user numbers, I think it is safe to say that on the first week of the launch we should see high download rates. This article by Techcrunch estimate that you need 38,400 daily downloads to rank on the top 25 list, with much less per category, 5,800 for the social networkings top 25.
So it is highly likely that steemit can feature in the top 25 lists for at least it's first week, this exposure will likely bring in many new users but it is also likely to grab the attention of the institutional investors that are always on the look out for the next big thing. As many venture capitalists keep a close eye on these lists.
And the other reasons
Steemit Communities coming soon
Steemfest2 around the corner
current dip providing a value opportunity
High roi from engagement, make ~20% APR from curating and posting