That’s because the SEO structure of steem is terrible. Steemit.com has good domain authority, but that’s about it.

Permalink structure is confused, canonical issues and duplicate content are everywhere, branding confusion, poor layout, and on and on. And while steempeak has enabled a sticky post, there is no such thing on steemit.com.

And then if someone does actually find your content and likes it, onboarding is still a major issue.

If you were able to put ad code in your own posts that might at least be something.

As it stands now, steem content does relatively little to actually bring money into steem