From what I've gathered unless you're already a whale on another platform like youtube with tens or hundreds of thousands of followers you have virtually almost no chance of monetizing here, unless of course one of those whales or a steem admin supports your content.

Building a follower base from scratch here seems difficult because almost everyone is thinking about about how to improve their own steem power which involves continuing to feed the whales your votes regardless of the quality of their posts compared to the average Joe. Combine that with the 30 minute rule and I suspect most people don't even read half the posts.

Though frankly I'm here because I actually enjoy and biased towards some of the whales and I like that they're being compensated well, It's just that I don't expect any real integrity in the advertised front page content.