I completely agree with your comment above, @ecoinstant. Out of millions of websites on the web, Steemit is currently ranked at 2,128 globally as per Alexa, and 1,458 in the US. This means that Steemit's power to pull in traffic is much more than many others in various niches. Inferring from Jerry's post, a blogger in the gardening niche, for example, has much higher chances of having his content seen on his blog on Steemit, than if it were on his own domain.

If you have good content in your niche, over the long term you will have many more followers by virtue of your content being posted on Steemit. So the "payout" could be considered in the form of having more followers over the long term, rather than the SBD and Steem payouts that are icing and cherry on top of the cake!