• At the blockchain level, there is a fee for creating a new account.
• That fee is currently 3 STEEM.
• The steemit.com website pays the registration fee for most users. In practice, the fee only applies to experts who create an account by interfacing directly with the blockchain.
• The fee is retained by the newly created account as its initial Steem Power balance.

Some questions for you to consider:

• Is it a scam if new users are paid to sign up?
• How do you keep an abuser from registering a million accounts without a fee? We can't do what most other sites do (e.g. rate limiting new account creation per IP address, email verification, CAPTCHA) because those techniques can't be done on a blockchain.

We've tried very hard to minimize the number of fees in the system.