If you read the SMT Whitepaper...

You might find some of the answers you seek in the section titled:

Increasing Market Demand for STEEM with SMTs and Implicit Value Drivers rather than Fees

There are several new value drivers to STEEM with the creation of SMTs.

STEEM Purchased for Transaction Bandwidth Enables Maximally Profitable Participation across SMTs

With the advent of SMTs, there is growing demand for users to hold STEEM, because users need to increasingly hold STEEM in order to participate, consume, and use Steem services at a rate maximally commensurate with their growing potentials in respective SMT ecosystems. Put simply, as power users are growing their earning potential in SMT communities, they need more STEEM to achieve the bandwidth allowance needed to perform at their highest possible rate of return in SMT ecosystems. At an application
level, the demand for bandwidth may be satisfied by users or by businesses, which can delegate surplus bandwidth to their users.

STEEM Supply is Locked into Liquidity Pools by Automated Market Makers

Each SMT that leverages Automated Market Makers augments the ratio of demand for STEEM to available supply of STEEM. The effect of the Automated Market Maker to STEEM is that each Automated Market Maker represents a permanent holding pool for STEEM, which represents a decrease in available supply. Given demand were to stay equal, the price of STEEM is caused to rise with the advent of each new Automated
Market Maker.

STEEM and SMT Demand Increases with Advent of New Powers of Influence

From a potential utility perspective, demand for STEEM increases as each SMT is created with Influence Sharing for Steem Power over a SMT’s rewards pool. The advent of each trace of Steem Power-based Shared Influence over an SMT’s Reward Pool gives new rights and usage to STEEM, which in turn drives demand for STEEM. These rights can also be granted from SMT to SMT, and the flow of value follows an identical pattern.

STEEM Demand Increases with Proliferation of SMT ICOs

At a platform level, other cause for demand may include exclusive financing opportunities, such as ICOs, which attract new capital into ecosystems, first flowing into the base asset, STEEM, and then flowing into SMTs. Increased capital in the ecosystem due to ICOs always presents an opportunity for net positive capital retained in STEEM, and at worst, a wash on the value of the base asset, where all of the STEEM is sold by the organization making the offering. The example of the worst case scenario is that an ICO occurs and $100 USD buys STEEM to buy the ICO’d SMT, then 100% of the STEEM received by the ICO is sold for USD - and no explicit net effect related to the value of STEEM. However, even when the net effect contribution of an ICO to the value of STEEM is apparently zero, it is an implicit net benefit in terms of attention received by STEEM and the Steem ecosystem, if we consider all new attention valuable. Further, it is reasonable to expect, based on the behavior of ICOs in Ethereum, that the majority of the STEEM received
by the ICO’ing organization will continue to be held on a speculative or promissory basis, therefore creating holding value.

Steem: The World’s Advertising Network

Along with these new value creating mechanisms, it is imperative to recognize the original value created for STEEM as an implicit attention and advertising network that now applies to all SMTs that utilize Proof-of-Brain rewards. Smart Media Tokens, such as STEEM, have inherent curation properties, such as their Rewards Pools, that give them reliability and credentials as an implicit advertising network. The Rewards Pool in SMTs
demands that fully-SMT-integrated interfaces, such as steemit.com, respect the pending SMT payouts on posts and then rank these posts from highest to lowest pending payout in pages often referred to as “Trending” - such that the posts can be audited by the community of SMT holders. The effect of this, which applies equally to STEEM as other SMTs, is a sorted “Trending” page that users (bloggers, vloggers, advertisers) can reliably use to evaluate the potential returns on buying higher placement on the page to attain more attention, and then these participants make decisions to buy or rent STEEM and SMTs to promote content. Through this process, as advertisers choose to buy and rent STEEM/SMTs to gain exposure, demand for STEEM/SMTs increases. These value driving properties can be described in a way similar to “Ethereum: the world computer”, but instead as “Steem: The world’s advertising network.”