It seems like bot owner profit is coming from capital investment in steem and any business activity there amounts to just a redistribution of that capital in an existing system. If anything it probably concentrates the wealth more or pushes the steem price down if rewards are cashed out of the system into fiat. Pushing that business model into a more manually curation based system could help the price.

It is really tough to guess where things are heading. Lots depends on where BTC goes from here. The market dominance is really high for BTC now. I think many people are expecting it to move higher and are not looking so much into other opportunities at the moment.

Having ads being paid by purchasing tokens on the communities that fit those ads and burning the ad purchased tokens could really boost the token price. It would also be a nice way for advertisers to get targeted ads placed. I could see LEO or AFIT really moving up if targeted ads were done this way and there seems to be support for doing this type of thing in those communities.