I believe STEEM's initial purpose was to be an attention token. That utility has never been brought to fruition and I wrote this in a post recently.
Shortly after, I started working on a Native Ads feature for hivemind that will enable communities to sell ad space in tokens (STEEM/SMTs). You can read an overview here. I pitched the idea to the Steemit team on GitHub too.
Attention has tremendous value and not having this utility is what hurt STEEM's economic value.