This is why I have very little interest in STEEM
So I joined STEEMIT a few months ago, thought it was great. Spend quite a bit of time on STEEM for the first two months, not only commenting, but I did write a few unique articles as well. I am pretty realistic and do realize they probably were not the best, but have seen way worse.
A few examples ::
https://steemit.com/money/@life-of-al/a-financial-lesson-that-i-wished-i-had-learn-t-earlier-in-life
https://steemit.com/life/@life-of-al/friends-that-are-bad-with-money-episode-1
https://steemit.com/life/@life-of-al/is-it-time-for-a-world-language
https://steemit.com/travel/@life-of-al/tendollarfoodchallenge-eat-out-food-challenge-south-africa
https://steemit.com/budget/@life-of-al/could-you-cut-your-food-budget-by-75-we-tried-it-for-four-weeks
For the above, I received around $0.5 for ALL. And many others small contributions say around 35 as well as 100 - 150 comments. I got to level 37 and then stayed there.
Just using this as an example, but this guy joined yesterday, is already at level 36 and earned more with this one post than I did in my 2 active months. Good for you niall - just using you as an example.
Is this sour grapes? Without a doubt. :)
But is it pointing to a problem? Not sure. I does seem that many leave quickly - but maybe that is just my perception. For me, it's not how little I made (I was probably overpaid!) - it was how much other people made for often, very little. Personally, STEEM 2.0 needs to take a good look at the rewards structure.
it was a lot easier to earn early on, of course, but know with over 300k users, competition for upvotes across big SP holders is higher and there are many more users with very little SP, this combination drives, in large part and IMO, the lower payouts. I would suggest you graph your moving average on post payouts across time and on roughly the same blog production rate. I would think your average creeps up slowly as your brand grows across your followers and new readers. The way you can juice up progress through this slowly rising curve is to buy SP which will attract more eyeballs to your posts, since they want your curation, but this tends to raise concerns on ponzi. Hope you find any of this helpful. Cheers.