The new accounts need Steem to fund for the bandwidth required to interact with the blockchain, so if people are willing to put up with the long wait times and verification process for a free account on the bank of Steemit then they are in, but otherwise they have to fund the account themselves through anonsteem. Steem is big and will continue to get bigger simply because the search engines are slurping up so much content that really soon we will dwarf any and all other content publishing platforms, at least that's what I think.