What controls the value of our payouts?

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It depends mainly on the four following things:

Steem price.

Reward pool.

Feed price.

Votes received by posts.

Steem price determines how much SBD is printed. If the price of Steem goes higher, more SBD is printed. This increases the payout of posts.

The payout on posts come from the reward pool. Higher reward pool allocation of Steem will increase the payout of all posts proportionally. For example, if reward pool increases by 10% for a specific period, the payouts for that period will increase by 10%.

Feed price is what ensures the SBD peg to US dollars. This feed price can either decrease or increase the payout of posts. Feed price is set by witnesses and it refers to SBD/Steem ratio. At the time of writing this article, feed price was  @ $0.81 SBD/STEEM.

The reward pool is proportionally distributed to all posts reaching payout on a certain period based on their received rshare of votes. If posts start receiving less votes overall, then the existing posts that are reaching payout will get a little extra.

For example, suppose 20 million SP is used in period x to vote all posts equally and all of the voters used exactly 50% of their voting power. Post count for period x is 1 million. 

But in period y, only 10 million SP was used to vote posts equally and all of the voters used exactly 25% of their voting power. And post number was same 1 million. Posts in period y will receive much higher rewards then posts in period x. It won't be double since the other factors such as reward pool, steem price, feed price etc are not constant.