RE: For how long are new posts profitable?
I would like to know this as well. I would believe that as long as an article is active that it would not be paid out until there is a slow down of creation or upvotes. The payout information at the end tells people what the community value. If makeup tutorials are making 30k the community is telling you they will pay lots of money for these tutorials. It also adds a refreshing amount of transparency that google and Facebook would never offer. As you probably know if you disclose your revenue that a company is giving you as part of a sponsorship or partner ship they will drop you and possibly sue you. This allows for a level of murky water where everyone is discourage from sharing information because chances are google and other companies are giving more money to the people they want to see more of based on their own bias. Interesting Post!
I think I was not clear enough on my question. I understand people want to know how much each article has earned. But I don't understand why the "Pending Payouts" and "Past Payouts" data is displayed when clicking the $ value.
If more people upvote a post after a payout, there will be an additional payout based on those votes.
See page 19 of the white paper: https://steem.io/SteemWhitePaper.pdf
Perhaps it shows if an article is still active that is will gradually pay out to the user over some set amount of time. Again, I don't know the exact numbers or even the exact idea. But I would love to have someone else comment what they know about this system. Thanks for responding!