It's an ongoing frustration to me that many friends I talk into joining then despair that they haven't seen immediate results. As in, after 1 to 3 days. I made zero dollars and zero cents for my entire first month, if you'll recall.
It's like anything else, you have to play to win. Sure, sometimes it gets really lean. Dire, even. But then other times it surges. The thing is, you need to have already stuck at it and become established to benefit from those surges.
I wish I knew how to convince them to take a longer view of things. One year is not a significant time investment to go from $0 USD per post to (currently) $200-$300 USD. People just get discouraged easily and quit. The successful few are just the stubborn ones who kept at it.
I couldn't put it better myself. I had one friend who joined and stick with it for about two months, in the last few weeks of that two months he got picked up by curie twice getting a payout of eight odd dollars on two separate posts. However when he didn't start getting that on every post he quit.
Its very short sighted. You are so right about the surges. There have been exceptionally lean times and just when you think it's getting awful something big usually happens!
Ive had a few buddies from YouTube that did that. Im actually making them a deal for their Steem for Paypal. TBH it kind of pisses me off that they quit.