I suspect we're going to see ORCID explode in usage and popularity over the next few years. And I don't think that's going to be driven by authors, at first. It's going to be driven by the publishers. This is going to be possible because of how well ORCID integrates with the current world of online academic publishing.

So imagine in a year or two, a journal like Nature hypothetically says, "We have this cool feature now called ORCID, and all authors submitting manuscripts MUST provide an ORCID ID. You'll love it, we swear." Then the same authors try to get another paper published, maybe in an Elsevier journal, and suddenly they're all screaming, "WTF I have this sweet ORCID ID, why can't your platform support ORCID?" Now the editors of that journal are going to remember ORCID and take it into consideration when they re-up their contracts with Elsevier (or jump ship). So of course Elsevier needs to support ORCID. Then more journals adopt it. And around the circle we go.

Those seeds are already being planted, and are going to drive up ORCID usage in a very organic and unassuming way. That's why I say it's sneaky. Not because they have a profit incentive, but because of the indirect means by which I think they're going to grow. It's a very different approach from academia.edu even though they're in the same general domain.