I'm not sure what determines whether or not someone earns anything or not. To be honest my blog is not the greatest. I'm not an expert on anything. But I'm a fairly funny guy with some good viewpoints on stuff. And I get good feedback and I get a lot of comments etc.

I also have a pretty large account with 5700SP, which is probably more than 99% of accounts (I think mine is ranked 1500 largest in terms of value) I also have quite a lot of followers. I post regularly and my content, even though not THE best - it's mediocre + perhaps.

Now, I'm not earning ANYTHING without using upvoting bots. Perhaps, if I'm lucky I'll get 5-10 upvotes from my Steemit-friends. I have over 2000 followers, and I get around 10 upvotes. That's 0,5%. My content will just be lost the second I post it. Unless I use bots of course..which will at least give me a SMALL shot at being seen in the trending/hot section. (Usually not trending, but often Hot)

I view the upvoting bots as paid advertising. I'm paying them to get a small shot at making some extra bucks. Sometimes I go into minus using bots, often times I make a small profit..and sometimes, if I'm lucky, some whale sees my posts and upvotes it with $5.

For those of us who doesn't have ANY big whale-friends constantly upvoting our material, it's impossible to make anything. I'm spending hours a day doing this, and the only way it's worth wile is to use bots. If I couldn't I would have to do something else, power down and leave Steemit. Because there wouldn't really be an incentive for me to be here. I could go back to Facebook or Twitter. Sure, I could log in and comment and discuss with the awesome people I've met here..but there wouldn't really be any incentive for me to keep $25,000 dollars in here.

I know that a lot of people are making money. I see you earn 14$ on this post. No offence, but I have to say I have made posts better than this one. I'm sure you can agree on that. Not saying you don't make better posts than me on average. I'm sure you do..and you do actually have good posts. But you earn 50-60$ on posts and I see you have some whales upvoting you. I don't even earn $3 :)

I'm not going to scream unfair. Like I said, I'm sure you've earned it. But from my perspective, even if my content suck..I still have to what I can to make some bucks here.

Let's say I'm pushing my capacity intellectually. I don't have much more to give. What should I do? If I stop using bots I will earn 2$ per post. 1,45$ of that would be from myself. Living in a high cost country, that's just not possible. Then I'd have to power down, get a job and leave Steemit.

But as long as there are possibilites to make more money here I will take advantage of those.

So there are only these possible outcomes:

1. I continue to use bots and at least make some money
2. I power down (because staking 25,000$ and not making anything from it is not worth it. I'd rather buy some other cryptos with that money than earning pennies auto-curating people)

My ears are VERY open to suggestions!