This article will be exploring where the inherent value of steem is derived from.
Traditional social media, blogs and microblogging sites make money by placing advertisements on their site. There are costs associated with running the sites such as hosting fees, employees and domain registration. The revenue of traditional sites is created by clicks, or how many people visit your page.
Now we have to compare steem with these sites. How will steem create value where other sites fail to?
Pros
A) Steemit is censorship free, you're free to post whatever you like even though it may get down-voted into oblivion
B) Steemit is open-source, the community creates the value, instead of a team of developers.
C)No barrier to entry like most blogging sites
D) This platform makes me question how do I define value
Cons
A) No barrier to entry, lots of garbage posts, posts that are not well thought out
B) Possibility for bots to abuse the system and make money without creating value
C) Centralized system, the few largest whales are the kings, if they don't like your content, you don't make money
D) Where is the inherent value. How do we define value as a community.
The biggest point from the pros and cons list and the point that I keep trying to work over in my mind is: Where is the value. What is the inherent value of steemit?
Comparing Steemit to Similar Sites
A traditional site like reddit that is the most similar to steemit makes money off of advertisements and people upgrading their memberships. The money generated goes to paying the people who work on the infrastructure, not those who create content.
On steemit, those who create content get paid and those who work on the infrastructure get paid because they are personally vested and have an interest in bettering the project.
So the value is 
The Value of Steem
The value of steemit is determined by 3 things
#1. What the developers contribute, upgrades, hardforks, new features.
#2. What the users contribute, more specifically, the quality of each post.
#3. How many new users current users bring in, and how much the new users spend powering up.
My Opinion
I'm going to be religiously watching the price of steem and trying to find correlations between hardforks, new users per day, updates, and price to see if the contents of this article are true. This whole article is speculation, speculation on what the value is. There may be something I missed, if so, feel free to point it out, I don't pretend to know everything, some of my underlying assumptions might be wrong and I'm open to all comments and criticisms.