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.