"Every day, the Steem blockchain mints new STEEM tokens and adds them to a community's "rewards pool". These tokens are then awarded to users for their contributions, based on the votes that their content receives. Users who hold more tokens in their account as "Steem Power" will get to decide where a larger portion of the rewards pool is distributed."
A fresh account will give like 0.002 per vote, while my account with 5000 Steem gives about 2$ per vote.
Also, people who vote get 'curation rewards' from the system. Depending on how early you voted and helped discovered a content, you get rewarded for it, even if it's only a small share, it adds up
Imagine if Facebook used a crypto for their ads instead of money. And you gain money back from people who like your ad making the ad cheaper or even profitable.
The DTube FAQ answer for "Where does the money come from" just says "The STEEM blockchain keeps printing new STEEM everyday. These new printed STEEM are given out as rewards." I'm hoping there's more to it than that, but I couldn't find what the mechanism for bringing value into the STEEM ecosystem is.
As far as I can tell, users of DTube don't pay anything to watch videos, or to comment, or to like videos, but their likes determine who gets paid on the STEEM blockchain. So who buys STEEM tokens and why?