Their are a few factors that influence the price of Steem recently:

• high price of SBD --> enables the less wealthy Steemians to buy cheap Steem back to power-up, where this would otherwise not affordable.

• a company announced a airdrop for Steem holders --> Steemians get free tokens --> people buy Steem to get some extra steem.

• the overall very good performance of the platform, while the prices are very low, relatively speaking.

That's all I can come up with right now.