The same would had happened if this same author would've joined Youtube in its early days from some imaginary mainstream service that has millions of viewers for every topic. Steem is in its early days, there's no massive viewerbase to support these authors who are accustomed to millions of views on their videos. They can't just expect to join here, create content and see them net them thousands.

We need more users, to get that we need to better content, but that's not enough, it needs to be promoted also to outside Steem. Throwing content to the void doesn't help, that's creating content without promoting it.

However if Steem will grow to something to the size of Youtube, even those small 1 dollars payouts would have proven to be a big paycheck in the end. That's something many forget. At the end, you're essentially gaining shares of Steem the ecosystem and those can provide wealth a long after your content, which you gained the shares from, has become irrelevant.

There's many aspects to Steem that isn't clear from the start it needs some mental gymnastics to figure it all out and some visionary spirit.